Autonomous Mobile Robot Navigation Using Harmonic Potential Field

Abstract

Mobile robot navigation has been an area of robotics which has gained massive attention among the researchers of robotics community. Path planning and obstacle avoidance are the key aspects of mobile robot navigation. This paper presents harmonic potential field based navigation algorithm for mobile robots. Harmonic potential field method overcomes the issue of local minima which was a major bottleneck in the case of artificial potential field method. The harmonic potential field is calculated using harmonic functions and Dirichlet boundary conditions are used for the obstacles, goal and initial position. The simulation results shows that the proposed method is able to overcome the local minima issue and navigate successfully from initial position to the goal without colliding into obstacles in static environment.