Autonomous Mobile Robot Navigation using Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System

Navigation of autonomous robots in unknown and cluttered environments lies among the marked trends in robotics. Unlike animals and humans, the collision-free movement of a robot is challenging and requires processing complex information. An autonomous robot needs to cope with a large amount of uncertainty while navigating. The previous methods have limitations, such as lacking obstacle avoidance behaviour, having a large number of governing rules, designing a separate controller for each navigation and obstacle avoidance, not considering the robot's dynamics, computationally expensive training, and poor performance in a cluttered environment. This paper proposes a method that comprises a single adaptive neuro fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) based controller with 16 rules compared to hundred of rules used by previous methods to address such problems. Our method takes heading angle along with distance sensors data as input. AU the inputs are fuzzified into linguistic variables such as near-far and left-right. Additionally, a fuzzy inference system (FIS) is designed and trained using the generated dataset for optimum performance of ANFIS. The proposed method efficiently provides collision-free navigation of the mobile robot in densely cluttered environments. Comprehensive experiments are performed to prove the robustness and potency of the proposed ANFIS controller. Moreover, the performance of the proposed method is compared with various previous methods. The results of these comparisons indicate our proposed method's superiority in finding a near-optimal path.