Adaptive Autonomous Navigation using Reactive Multi-agent System for Control Law Merging

This paper deals with intelligent autonomous navigation of a vehicle in cluttered environment. We present a control architecture for safe and smooth navigation of a Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV). This control architecture is designed to allow the use of a single control law for different vehicle contexts (attraction to the target, obstacle avoidance, etc.) [4]. The reactive obstacle avoidance strategy is based on the limit-cycle approach [2]. To manage the interaction between the controllers according to the context, the multi-agent system is proposed. Multi-agent systems are an efficient approach for problem solving and decision making. They can be applied to a wide range of applications thanks to their intrinsic properties such as self-organization/emergent phenomena. Merging approach between control laws is based on their properties to adapt the control to the environment. Different simulations on cluttered environments show the performance and the efficiency of our proposal, to obtain fully reactive and safe control strategy, for the navigation of a UGV.