A Path Planning Method for Autonomous Mobile Robots

Mobile robots often find themselves in a situation where they must find a trajectory to another position in their environment, subject to constraints posed by obstacles and the capabilities of the robot itself. This is the problem of planning a path through a continuous domain, for which several approaches have been developed. A method for autonomous mobile robot path planning is presented. Initially, the environment model, given as a closed chain of polygonal obstacles, is transformed into a visibility graph of obstacle vertices with a minimum number of links. An additional visibility graph of obstacle is formed simultaneously. The given initial point and destination point are presented as obstacles with a single vertex and are added to the determined graphs as vertices and as obstacles correspondingly. The extended graphs are updated and in the first step a shortest path from initial point to destination point through the obstacles is searching for. By this method a subset of obstacles is selected. On this basis from the visibility graph of obstacle vertices a sub-graph is detached, containing only the vertices of obstacles, belonging to the selected subset. We search the detached sub-graph to find the shortest path between the given points. For determination of the visible obstacle vertices a fuzzy logic algorithm is implemented