Indoor Navigation and Guidance of an Autonomous Robot Vehicle with Static Obstacle Avoidance and Optimal Path Finding Algorithm

This work, presents an application for static obstacle avoidance and optimal path finding of an autonomous robot vehicle with navigation and control. Angular position and location of the vehicle is measured intermittent by means of an electronic compass sensor and a linear position encoder for the navigation purposes. Vehicle movements and orientation is controlled real time by a stationary computer. Besides navigation a self developed algorithm is integrated to the system for static obstacle avoidance and optimal path finding. An environmental map to detect the static obstacle positions are pre-defined and different maps depended on working area are evaluated by using a suitable computer program. To guide the vehicle to a given target, an optimal path calculation algorithm is applied. During high level control operations are executed by the computer, low level operations are made by a microcontroller to minimize time depended errors. The results and simulations of experimental testing showed the effectiveness of the proposed approach for navigation applications.