Mobile Robot Rendezvous Using Potential Fields combined With Parallel Navigation

Abstract

Industrial robotics, military, surveying, and delivery applications have laid a foundation for research into autonomous machines, including unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous ground vehicles, and autonomous undersea vehicles. This paper supports this research by developing a new guidance method which combines potential fields, typically used for obstacle avoidance, and parallel navigation, a popular missile guidance method. The new unified algorithm allows a mobile robot interceptor to guide to, and rendezvous with, a moving target while avoiding obstacles in its path. A Matlab simulator is used to analyze performance for different interceptor-target geometries and obstacle densities. Simulations and analysis show that the combined algorithm increases performance by reducing the time-to-contact in most of the cases. Specifically, it was found to provide a 14.4%–21.3% improvement in approximately 96%–98% of the simulation cases.