Orientation-Aware Motion Planning in Complex Workspaces using Adaptive Harmonic Potential Fields

Abstract

In this work, a hybrid control scheme is presented in order to address the navigation problem for a planar robotic platform of arbitrary shape that is moving inside an obstacle cluttered workspace. Given an initial and desired robot configuration, we propose a methodology based on approximate configuration space decomposition techniques that makes use of heuristics to adaptively refine a partition of the configuration space into non-overlapping, adjacent slices. Furthermore, we employ appropriate workspace transformations and adaptive potential field based control laws that integrate elegantly with the type of configuration space representation used, in order to safely navigate within a given cell and successfully cross over to the next, for almost all initial configurations, until the desired configuration is reached. Finally, we present simulation results that demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed control scheme.