Integration of a novel path planning and control technique in a navigation strategy

The purpose of the work presented in this paper is to present a novel optimisation approach for path planning based on dynamic programming and to integrate it into a proposed navigation strategy. The proposed navigation strategy is a finite-state machine that integrates three navigation aspects. This strategy falls in the category of hybrid architectures. The two aspects other than path planning discussed in this paper are path tracking and obstacle avoidance. Other aspects and behaviours can easily be added. For path tracking, a fuzzy control technique is suggested. The fuzzy controller is used to drive the robot through a set of waypoints leading to the destination. The curvature velocity method is proposed for obstacle avoidance. The testing was conducted on a P3-AT all-terrain mobile robot equipped with encoders, a gyroscope and sonar sensors for localisation and environment perception. The test results validate the theoretical analysis.