Dynamic steering control of conventionally steered mobile robots

Abstract

Abstract This article presents an algorithm for dynamically steering an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) along a collision‐free path to a goal using local feedback information. A twolevel navigation algorithm is presented in which a subgoal selection algorithm (SSA) generates visible subgoals to be pursued by the steering control algorithm (SCA). An earlier article presented the SSA in detail, demonstrating how subgoals can be updated while the AMR is moving so that a continuous motion is achieved without stopping to replan the path when new sensor data become available. This study focuses on the SCA. In particular, a general feedback scheme is developed for dynamically steering an AMR to a visible goal in the local obstacle‐free space identified by the SSA. We present the detailed implementation of the SCA for a conventionally steered AMR (CAMR). Simulation results are presented that demonstrate the effectiveness of the combined SSA‐SCA feedback scheme. The algorithm has been successfully implemented on the NavLab at CMU.