Robust Reactive Mobile Robot Navigation with Modified DWA+CG

A robust reactive collision avoidance method is presented taking into account of mobile robot kinematic and dynamic constraints. Many of the earlier standard reactive navigation methods provide most preferable direction as a solution to navigation but do not consider dynamic constraints. Even, the most recent approach of gap-based navigation found in the literature, that overcomes many of the shortcomings of earlier methods, is a directional method and lacks in addressing the issue of robot dynamics. On the other hand, Dynamic Window Approach (DWA) explicitly takes account of vehicle dynamics and obstacle avoidance into its design, but suffers from common pitfalls associated with reactive methods. Here, we propose evolving a robust reactive method integrating DWA and Closest Gap (CG) based methods together with minor modification that takes advantages of both and eliminates disadvantages of each of the methods. By this, we address the problem of incorporating robot dynamics into directional methods. The effectiveness of the proposed method will be demonstrated with both simulated and experimental results.