Development of Master-slave Robot System - Obstacle avoidance algorithm -

Abstract

The objective of the study is to develop control system of autonomous mobile robots for farmingoperation. One of the goals of this study is to investigate the use of mobile robots with as little aspossible centralized control. The key solution to this decentralization problem is to give moreautonomy to the vehicles to allow them to cope with unexpected events and obstacles, inaccurateenvironment model, other vehicles, and so on. This high level of autonomy is achieved usingadvanced sensor-based capabilities (for localization, obstacle detection and modeling) as well asplanning and deliberation between the robots through local communication and coordination. Insuch context, the dynamics of the environment, the impossibility to correctly estimate theduration of actions (the robots may be slowed down due to obstacle avoidance or re-localizationactions, and so on) prevent a central system from elaborating long or medium term efficient andreliable detailed robot plans. In this study, we focus on obstacle avoidance of the multi-robot.Two robot tractors were employed as multi-robot system. Two robots have local communicationability and an own controller. The robot, which detected the moving obstacle, could take anaction to avoid clash by selecting slow-down and generating intermediate pathway.