The Fluid Dynamics Applied to Mobile Robot Motion: The Stream Field Method

Mobile robots need a powerful and flexible navigation system in order to move around autonomously in an incompletely known and changing environm.ent. In this paper we present a computational metaphor for path generation which is gleaned from fluid dynamics. It is powerful because it can find optimal paths an a maze of arbitrary com,plexity and it is flexible because it readily adapts to any change iw the topology of $he maze. We also show th.at b y choosing appropriate bounday conditions, the fluid dynamics metnph.or does not suffer from local minima. Th.e paper further discusses the natural parallelism of the metaphor, its implementation on the DAP computer and examines some possible extensions by showing that additional constraints on the path, such as ihe maximal clearunce, can be tackled using the fluid metaphor. Finally the topological properties of the path generated b y the fluid dynamics metaphor a r e discussed usin.g tools of t opolagy.