Evolutionary Univector Field-based Navigation with Collision Avoidance for Mobile Robot

This paper proposes a novel vector field navigation method by using the velocity vector of a robot to avoid obstacles in dynamic environment. Shifting vector and virtual obstacle are proposed to derive the center of repulsive field which makes the robot move away from the obstacle: The shifting vector is derived from the velocity vector of the robot and the obstacle and the virtual obstacle is made by adding the shifting vector to the real obstacle. By considering the velocity vector of an obstacle with a shifting vector and a virtual obstacle, the robot can avoid not only stationary obstacles but also dynamic obstacles, where the fields are optimized by evolutionary programming. The performance of proposed method is demonstrated by simulations and experiments in robot soccer system.