Mobile Robot Path Planning In Dynamic Environments

This paper presents our approach to the problem of, controlling a mobile robot which must travel in dynamic environments. A dynamic environment is one which has obstacles, both stationary and moving, of which the robot is unaware at the time the original path plan is developed. There exists a natural decomposition of the path planning problem which provides the basis for dealing with such environments. The decomposition consists of (1) planning a path which avoids all the known static obstacles prior to initiating any motion, and (2) as the path motion is executed, the motion control is updated in real-time to avoid collisions with any unforseen obstacles either stationary or moving. The algorithms for both the static and the dynamic avoidance of obstacles is presented.