Hardware and Software Design for Mobile Robot’s Navigation Over On-Road and Off-Road Curvature Paths

Navigating a mobile robot through a curve path is a difficult task in both on-road and off-road navigation. This research provides a hardware and software platform to address this issue. Two types of research have been conducted in this paper. First, a hardware platform consisting of a Linear Actuator-based steering mechanism is implemented to hold the steering at the desired angle. Second, the curvature information from Google Maps path data is collected and used to improve the existing Pure Pursuit algorithm, which is known as the curve-aware Pure Pursuit (C-PP) algorithm, which navigates a mobile robot in both on-road and off-road (with scattered small obstacles) environments. The mobile robot is navigated using C-PP and steering is controlled by a Linear Actuator. The results taken in real-time and simulation show that the proposed algorithm for on-road and off-road environments has lower longitudinal and lateral RMSE values compared to the existing algorithms.