Efficient Path Planning and Real-Time Obstacle Avoidance for Mobile Robots

With the development of modern technologies, intelligent mobile robots are widely needed. However, the challenges in path planning and obstacles avoiding for mobile robots still remain. When the obstacles dynamically appear and the robot does not know the exact location of the obstacles as well as the shape of the obstacles, how to conduct efficient path finding and obstacle avoiding is still open. In this paper, we investigate how a self-walking robot can observe and adopt efficient strategies to avoid the dynamic obstacles that appear in the way to the destination. We propose a practical robot navigation model while considering the dimension of the robot and the obstacles observed. Based on this model, efficient navigation algorithms are developed using the proposed techniques of surpassing, bypassing, and virtual blocks. Our experiment and implementation with V-REP shows that the proposed schemes are effective in path planning and obstacle avoiding.