Network optimization for sensor based robotic navigation with moving obstacles

The problem of finding a path for the motion of a small mobile robot from a starting point to a fixed target in a two dimensional domain is considered in the presence of moving arbitrary shaped obstacles. No a priori information is known in advance about the geometry and the dimensions of the workspace nor about the number, extension and location of obstacles. The robot has a sensing device that detects all obstacles or pieces of walls lying beyond a fixed view range. A discrete version of the problem is solved by an iterative algorithm that at any iteration step finds the smallest path length from the actual point to the target with respect to the actual knowledge about the obstacles, then the robot is steered along the path until a new obstacle point interfering with the path is found, at this point a new iteration is started. Such an algorithm stops in a number of steps depending on the geometry, finding a solution for the problem or detecting that the problem is unfeasible. Since the algorithm must be applied on line, the effectiveness of the method depends strongly on the efficiency of the optimization step.