Coordinate Reference Frame Technique for Robotic Planar Path Planning

Abstract

A Robot is swiftly advancing from workshop entity, which is objectively bound to its work cell, to a growingly intricate machine competent of doing demanding jobs in our day-to-day environment. A mobile robot which initially used for surveillance, reconnaissance and patrolling, extended its footprint in the areas of explosive devices handling, mine laying, communications relays, logistics transportation, convoy protection, road clearance, target identification and tracking, remotely operated weapons, disaster management, hospitality sector, home automation, driverless cars etc. This mobility is hugely dependent on the autonomy of the robot. Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) is one which is capable of traveling an uncontrolled arena without the supervision of the operator. Diverse approaches like vision-based techniques, fuzzy logic, artificial neural mapping, reactive navigation techniques, biologically inspired techniques, geometrical path planning etc. are used individually or combined to find the collision-free path. This paper discusses a new geometrical method called as Coordinate Reference Frame (CRF) approach for the navigation of mobile robot operating in a static environment consisting of elliptical obstacles. A mathematical formulation has been developed to obtain these paths and Center of Gravity Approach (CGA) is used to find the shortest among all obtained paths. The simulation results were implemented with an experiment. The results prove that the proposed approach to be very effective as the robot navigates to the defined target point without colliding with the obstacles in the arena. The cost involved in this project is very minimal, which makes this robot suitable for industries, hospitals, hotels, offices, etc. These kind of robots are very suitable for home robots, transportation robots, service robots, etc.