Establish The Special Virtual Manipulator Model for Mobile Robot Obstacle Avoidance and Path Planning

This paper presents a new modeling method for mobile robot obstacle avoidance problem and multi-robot system path planning problem. In this paper, we study the inner relationship between the manipulator structure and the mobile robot obstacle avoidance and path planning. We demonstrate that the mobile robot obstacle avoiding problem can be simplified into the manipulator structure construction, based on the consideration of the available area of both the mobile robot and the special structured manipulator. Meanwhile, we demonstrate the possibility to design a special virtual multi-link manipulator to satisfy the restriction when making the plan for the multi-robot team's movement. And in the later, we figure out the practical design to solve two problems: 1. Single robot with single obstacle; 2. Multi-robot team path planning. The virtual manipulator model eliminates the explicit restrictions of parameters in mobile robot obstacle avoidance problem and multi-robot team path planning problem into implicit ones by implementing those restriction with the structure characters of the virtual manipulator, hence make it easy and safe to solve those problems.

I. Introduction

Mobile robot path planning and obstacle avoidance are the most interesting problem in the area of mobile robot.