Low Cost Point to Point Navigation System

This document describes a novel low-cost methodology called “Towards and Tangent” for point to point navigation in robotics systems. The system navigates in an unknown environment, and it avoids obstacles to reach the desired point, using only laser range sensor, without any integration with mems or another kind of data. It is composed by two simple steps: head toward the goal and select the direction with the lower angle to overcome the obstacle. In this way, compared to the state of the art algorithms, it requires less computational resources, since it does not need to detect obstacles discontinuities and do not need to follow an obstacle's boundaries. Moreover, a simple state machine can handle both obstacle avoidance and point to point navigation. Even if the system is easy to implement and requires low resources, it reaches high performances, in line with more sophisticated algorithms and works very well in real-time.