Collision free autonomous navigation and formation building for non-holonomic ground robots

Abstract: The primary objective of a safe navigation algorithm is to guide the object from its current position to the target position while avoiding any collision with the en-route obstacles, and the appropriate obstacle avoidance strategies are the key factors to ensure safe navigation tasks in dynamic environments. In this report, three different obstacle avoidance strategies for safe navigation in dynamic environments have been presented. The biologically-inspired navigation algorithm (BINA) is efficient in terms of avoidance time. The equidistant based navigation algorithm (ENA) is able to achieve navigation task with in uncertain dynamic environments. The navigation algorithm algorithm based on an integrated environment representation (NAIER) allows the object to seek a safe path through obstacles in unknown dynamic environment in a human-like fashion. The performances and features of the proposed navigation algorithms are confirmed by extensive simulation results and experiments with a real non-holonomic mobile robot. The algorithms have been implemented on two real control systems: intelligent wheelchair and robotic hospital bed. The performance of the proposed algorithms with SAM and Flexbed demonstrate their capabilities to achieve navigation tasks in complicated real time scenarios. The proposed algorithms are easy to be implemented in real time and costly efficient. An extra study on networked multi-robots formation building algorithm is presented in this paper. A constructive and easy-to-implement decentralised control is proposed for a formation building of a group of random positioned objects. Furthermore, the problem of formation building with anonymous objects is addressed. This randomised decentralised navigation algorithm achieves the convergence to a desired configuration with probability 1.