Motion Planning using Potential Fields

Abstract

The objective of these notes is to describe a reactive approach to motion planning for mobile robots. In a reactive approach, trajectories are not planned explicitly. Rather, robot interactions are defined explicitly and the robot motion is said to "emerge." The drawback of reactive methods is that it is sometimes difficult to get the robot to do exactly what you want. The reactive approach that will be described in these notes is called the "virtual fields" method and is commonly used in robotics.