Partial Center of Area Method Used for Reactive Autonomous Robot Navigation

A new method for reactive autonomous robot navigation using the center of area of detected free space around the robot is described. The proposed method uses only part of detected free space in front of the robot to compute a partial center of area. It is then used to guide the robot in a path suitable for smooth and robust wandering in complex environments. A simple modification in the algorithm can make it useful for obstacle avoidance in reaching a stimulus goal. The proposed method is used in some examples of simulated experiments on map navigation and wandering and it is compared with standard wandering using Aria library from MobileRobots. Also some experiments in obstacle avoidance navigation to reach a stimulus goal are shown in different maps.