Reactive obstacle avoidance in crowded environments for 2D omni-directional robot

The work describes a heuristic control strategy comprising reactive obstacle avoidance for omni-directional planar robot. The proposed method is based on artificial potential fields. Appropriate reshaping of repelling potential fields incorporating warping vectors and warping functions reduces the problem of local minima. Moreover, a solution to saddle point avoidance based on potential hessian is proposed. Numerical tests are conducted to indicate the validity and efficiency of the method. The strategy applies only to circular non-overlapping obstacles.