Smart navigation of autonomous mobile robots by Time-Variant Artificial Potential Fields: A fuzzy approach

Several recently-designed schemes for the navigation problem, which lead to impressive denouements for custom mobile robots, could not be considered as efficient approaches for power-optimized navigation of mobile robots in planetary missions. Furthermore, with due attention to noticeable complexity of our previous established strategy, i.e. Time-Variant Artificial Potential Fields (TAPF), a novel smart control approach is presented in this paper. Devised central fuzzy controller syncretizes both remarkable flexibility in navigation of the rover and coherent control without switching among different control methods in presence of the intrinsic complexity of TAPFs. This objective is also acquired by using various sensors with trivial computational overhead instead of utilization of machine vision techniques; Whereas, the vehicle will be encountered with data consolidation for some different sensors in order to reach into an unified perception from its circumferential environment. Simulated results and practical experiments, which are obtained through PIONEER™ mobile robot as the test bed, verify our accomplishments for TAPF handling and catch an efficient result for navigation of space rovers.