Download Path Tracking and Obstacle Avoidance for a Miniature Robot

Abstract
Path tracking and obstacle avoidance are two very important behaviours that must be
considered in the process of developing Autonomous Ground Vehicles, AGV:S. An AGV is a
vehicle with the ability to operate all by itself at ground level, that is an unmanned vehicle
under the control of a computer. A lot of progress has been done in the field of developing
AGV:s in the last decade, and successful applications has been made in both mining and
agriculture. Now the research is starting to concentrate on developing an AGE that can
operate in forest-like environments. It is in this kind of challenging environments that path
tracking and especially obstacle avoidance becomes very important issues.
When in path tracking mode, the vehicle is travelling along a memorized path under the
complete control of a computer. The path has then been memorized by letting a human
operator manually remote the vehicle along a predefined path. If the AGV during the process
of path tracking detects any new obstacles on the path, the obstacle avoidance routine should
find a new route around the obstacle and then return on the path.
In this project I will implement and evaluate algorithms for path tracking and obstacle
avoidance on a miniature robot. The work is related to similar problems in the IFOR-project
[4]. The robot I will be working with is the Khepera model, a two-wheeled differential steered
small robot that uses eight proximity sensors and a camera module for detection of obstacles.
I will study and evaluate the performance of existing well known path tracking algorithms,
like follow-the-carrot and pure-pursuit, as well as the more recently developed vector-pursuit
tracking method.
As for the obstacle avoidance behaviour, I noticed that a simple local algorithm would be
suitable in this project, because of lacking precision in the Kheperas ability to detect
obstacles. The Matlab environment is used for all implementation and testing, as well as the
displaying of tracking routes and evaluations of the various methods.