Obstacle avoidance using wall-following strategy for indoor mobile robots

This paper proposes a fuzzy logic methodology to control an indoor mobile robot for a complete navigation in an unknown environment. The methodology incorporates two basic behaviors, namely: reaching the goal and avoiding obstacles. The obstacle avoidance behavior is treated using wall-following scheme based on a fuzzy technique proposed for this proposed. The mobile robot control mechanism uses some sort of knowledge-base arranged in a set of fuzzy-rule-base to implement the wanted behavior that makes the mobile robot follow the boundary of an obstacle or a wall. A constant distance to the obstacle/wall is maintained while the robot tries successfully to get around this difficulty. Once the path is clear, the obstacle avoidance behavior is inhibited and reaching the goal behavior is activated using a second fuzzy controller. In order to handle data uncertainties, Type-2 fuzzy sets are considered. This methodology was successfully tested on a real mobile robot for different sort of scenarios.