A Potential Field Approach for Controlling a Mobile Robot to Track a Moving Target

Potential field method is widely used for path planning of mobile robots, which in many applications, is to find the direction of the robot when the target and obstacles are stationary. In this paper, it is extended to plan the robot's speed as well as its path (direction) when the robot tracks a moving target among obstacles. Within the general steepest descent control and Lyapunov frameworks, the direction and the speed of the robot are determined by the velocities of the target or the obstacles and the relative position between the robot and the environment. The speed-direction relation , and the effects of planning parameters on the planing results are also analyzed. Simulation studies are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach in various situations.