The Expanded Guide Circle (EGC) method has been originally proposed as the guidance navigation method for improving the efficiency of the remote operation using the sensory information. The previous algorithm is, however, concerned only for the omni-directional mobile robot, so it needs to suggest a suitable one for a mobile robot with non-holonomic constraints. The ego-kinematic transform is a method to map points of R2 into the ego-kinematic space which implicitly represents non-holonomic constraints for admissible paths. Thus, robots with non-holonomic constraints in the ego-kinematic space can be considered as “free-flying object”. In this paper, we propose an effective obstacle avoidance method for mobile robots with non-holonomic constraints by applying EGC method in the ego-kinematic space using the ego-kinematic transformation. This proposed method shows that it works better for non-holonomic mobile robots such as differential-drive robot than the original one. The simulation results show its effectiveness of performance.

This paper presents a goal-directed reactive obstacle avoidance method based on lane method. The reactive collision avoidance is necessarily required for a robot to navigate autonomously in dynamic environments. Many methods are suggested to implement this concept and one of them is the lane method. The lane method divides the environment into lanes and then chooses the best lane to follow. The proposed method does not use the discrete lane but chooses a line closest to the original target line without collision when an obstacle is detected, thus it has a merit in the aspect of running time and it is more proper for narrow corridor environment. If an obstacle disturbs the movement of a robot by blocking a target path, a robot generates a temporary target line, which is parallel to an original target line and tangential to an obstacle circle, to avoid a collision with an obstacle and changes to and follows that line until an obstacle is removed. After an obstacle is clear, a robot returns to an original target line and proceeds to the goal point. Obstacle is recognized by laser range finder sensor and represented by a circle. Our method has been implemented and tested in a corridor environment and experimental results show that our method can work reliably.