A novel obstacle avoidance method for low-cost household mobile robot

As the working environment for intelligent mobile robot is complex and changeful, there is a higher requirement for the obstacle avoidance ability of the robot. With the Enhanced Vector Field Histogram method (VFH+), it does not consider the change of obstacle’s position and direction and robot’s real-time speed. For this reason, an improved method, called Mobile and Static Vector field method (MSV), based on the VFH+ method is proposed. This method eliminates the disadvantages of the VFH+ method and further perfects the extraction and utilization of the environment information. The results of simulation and experiment show this method has the characteristics of real-time, optimization and stability for mobile robot obstacle avoidance in the indoor environment.