Hybrid and Safe Control Architecture for Mobile Robot Navigation

This paper deals with a multi-mode control architecture for robot navigation while using hybrid control. It presents, an adaptive and flexible mechanism of control which guarantees the stability and the smoothness of the switch between controllers. Moreover, a specific safety mode is proposed and applied on the robot which navigates very close to obstacles. The overall architecture allows to obtain very smooth trajectories while guaranteeing very safe obstacle avoidance. Many simulations on different robot configurations and cluttered environments permits to confirm the reliability and the robustness of the proposed control architecture. In addition, an appropriate indicator is proposed to quantify the trajectory smoothness.