10 - Seeking a path through the crowd: Robot navigation among unknowingly moving obstacles based on an integrated representation of the environment

Abstract

This chapter presents a novel reactive algorithm for collision-free navigation of a nonholonomic robot in unknown complex dynamic environments with moving obstacles. The novelty is related to employment of an integrated representation of the information about the environment, which does not require separating obstacles and approximating their shapes by discs or polygons, and is very easy to obtain in practice. Moreover, the presented algorithm does not require any information about the obstacles’ velocities. Under the examined navigation algorithm, the robot efficiently seeks a short path through a crowd of moving or steady obstacles, rather than avoiding the crowd as a whole, like many other navigation algorithms do. A mathematically rigorous analysis of the proposed approach is provided. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated via experiments with a real robot and extensive computer simulations.