Collision free path planning and control of wheeled mobile robot using Kohonen self-organising map

In this paper we propose a sensor-based navigation method for navigation of wheeled mobile robot, based on the Kohonen self-organising map (SOM). We discuss a sensor-based approach to path design and control of wheeled mobile robot in an unknown 2-D environment with static obstacles. A strategy of reactive navigation is developed including two main behaviours: a reaching the middle of a collision-free space behaviour, and a goal-seeking behaviour. Each low-level behaviour has been designed at design stage and then fused to determine a proper actions acting on the environment at running stage. The combiner can fuse low-level behaviours so that the mobile robot can go for the goal position without colliding with obstacles one for the convex obstacles and one for the concave ones. The combiner is a softswitch, based on the idea of artificial potential fields, that chooses more then one action to be active with different degrees at each time step. The output of the navigation level is fed into a neural tracking controller that takes into account the dynamics of the mobile robot. The purpose of the neural controller is to generate the commands for the servo-systems of the robot so it may choose its way to its goal autonomously, while reacting in real-time to unexpected events. Computer simulation has been conducted to illustrate the performance of the proposed solution by a series of experiments on the emulator of wheeled mobile robot Pioneer-2DX.