Hybrid control for tracking environmental level sets by nonholonomic robots in maze-like environments

Abstract

A non-holonomic constant-speed robot travels in an unknown maze-like environment cluttered with complex obstacles. Through the obstacle-free part of the plane, the robot should autonomously arrive at the isoline where an unknown scalar field assumes a given value. Afterwards, it should track the obstacle-free part of the isoline. The robot has access only to the field value at the current location and the distance from this location to the obstacles. We present a hybrid nonlinear navigation law that solves this mission. The law does not use estimation of the field gradient and is non-demanding with respect to both computation and motion. The non-local convergence of the proposed algorithm is rigorously justified and confirmed by computer simulation tests.