A novel collision-free navigation method for autonomous chaotic mobile robots

This article discusses a novel collision-free navigation method for mobile robots, based on chaos and image processing. The novelty is that the mobile robot can explore a workspace with dimensions from 1 m x 1 m to 1 km x 1 km, with any irregular structure, avoiding both obstacles, also with any random shape, and boundaries of the workspace. All positions of the mobile robot are generated by the chaotic dynamic system. Furthermore, a novel memory algorithm is developed to avoid that the mobile robot revisit sections of the workspace. As a consequence, the robot can not only explore the full workspace in less time, in comparison when the memory algorithm is not used, but also avoid that the robot gets stuck in local traps. The inverse Jacobian of the mobile robot is used as control law, iteratively reducing the position error at each point of the chaotic path and computing the angular velocities for each motion. Numerical simulations were performed within Matlab environment to evaluate the chaotic path planning strategy in different scenarios and with different initial positions. Experimental results illustrate the usefulness of the proposed collision-free chaotic navigation method and it can be applied to various areas, such as household, agriculture, education, manufacturing, patrolling, medical care, military and so on.