Improving velocity obstacle approach for obstacle avoidance in indoor environments

The velocity obstacle approach (VO) is considered an easy and simple method to avoid moving obstacles, where the collision cone principle is used to detect the collision situation between two circular-shaped objects. The VO approach has two challenges when applied in indoor environments. The first challenge is to extract collision cones of non-circular objects from sensor data, where applying fitting circle methods generally produce large and inaccurate collision cones specially for line-shaped obstacle such as walls. The second challenge is that the mobile robot cannot sometimes move to its goal because all its velocities to the goal are located within collision cones. The contribution of this paper is that a method was demonstrated to extract the collision cones of circular and non-circular objects using a laser sensor, where the obstacle size and the time to collision are considered to weight velocities of the robot. Experiments carried out in an indoor environment showed that the mobile robot successfully avoided dynamic obstacles which have different abilities to avoid other obstacles.