Nearness diagram navigation (ND): a new real time collision avoidance approach

This paper presents a new real-time collision avoidance approach for mobile robots. The Nearness Diagram method (ND) performs a high level information extraction and interpr etation of the envir onment. Subsequently, this information is used to gener ate the motion commands. The proposed approach is well-suited to deal with unknown, unstructur edand dynamic envir onments,where problems of other appr oachesare avoided. Some experimental results are shown using an holonomic mobile base to demonstrate the usefulness of the method.