Design of a small mobile robot using an efficient heuristic approach for reduced travel time avoiding obstacles

An autonomous mobile robot system that can navigate from a given start point to an end point has been developed. It carves out a path and builds a two dimensional grid based map using the combination of wavefront algorithm and A* search algorithm for a given state of the environment. The robot can detect obstacles on its path and change its course to reach the target. If the position of the obstacle changes, the robot can update the two dimensional map, if the area in which the obstacle was present happens to be scanned again, to find a path. The obstacle detection strategy and the robot's implementation have been described in detail. Changes have been made to the obstacle detection strategy and the heuristic function of the A* search and the results are observed to be interesting.