A wall-following algorithm based on dynamic virtual walls for mobile robots navigation

Abstract

The behavior of wall-following for mobile robots has extended applications, such as intelligent inspection, security patrol and venue service. In this paper, we propose a novel wall-following algorithm based on dynamic virtual walls for mobile robots. The information of environments is firstly obtained by a laser range finder, which is attached to the mobile robot. Then partial sensor data is selected to construct a virtual environment, which is a dynamic virtual wall in this paper. A PD controller is successively utilized to control mobile robots to move along the virtual wall smoothly at adaptively adjusted speed. Meanwhile, obstacle avoidance is also achieved in this one general framework with no switching scheme introduced. Simulations and experiments in various environments have been carried out to verify the effectiveness and evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm.