A Potential Approach For A Point Mobile Robot On An Implicit Potential Field Without The Generation Of Local Minima

Abstract

A number of potential approaches have been presented to move a mobile robot at a given goal p oint after the point r obot is placed on an arbitrary point in the workspace. In general, they control the robot according to a force generated from a potential field wiLh an rxplicit function. To arrivr thr robot at thr goal poinL certainly, Lhc approach must prepare a potential field without any local minimum except for the global minimum at the goal point in the workspace. With respect to the calculation time, however, it is difficult for us to represent the potential field by any explicit function. From this point of view, we propose a type of the approach to define a force field by an i mplicit function, which is similar to a potential field. In this approach, we require no calculation time for selecting and transforming the function so as not to have any local minimum. As a result, the proposed approach is superior to previous potential approaches since it moves the robot at the goal p oint surely without hard p re-processing for e xplicit construction of the potential field.