A comparative study on some navigation schemes of a real robot tackling moving obstacles

Abstract

A comparative study of various robot motion planning schemes has been made in the present study. Two soft computing (SC)-based approaches, namely genetic-fuzzy and genetic-neural systems and a conventional potential field method (PFM) have been developed for this purpose. Training to the SC-based approaches is given off-line and the performance of the optimal motion planner has been tested on a real robot. Results of the SC-based motion planners have been compared between themselves and with those of the conventional PFM. Both the SC-based approaches are found to perform better than the PFM in terms of traveling time taken by the robot. Moreover, the performance of fuzzy logic-based motion planner is seen to be comparable with that of neural network-based motion planner. Comparisons among all these three motion planning schemes have been made in terms of robustness, adaptability, goal reaching capability and repeatability. Both the SC-based approaches are found to be more adaptive and robust compared to the PFM. It may be due to the fact that there is no in-built learning module in the PFM and consequently, it is unable to plan the velocity of the robot properly.