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Integrated Obstacle Avoidance and Path Following Through a Feedback Control Law

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Abstract

The article proposes a novel approach to path following in the presence of obstacles with unique characteristics. First, the approach proposes an integrated method for obstacle avoidance and path following based on a single feedback control law, which produces commands to actuators directly executable by a robot with unicycle kinematics. Second, the approach offers a new solution to the well–known dilemma that one has to face when dealing with multiple sensor readings, i.e., whether it is better, to summarize a huge amount of sensor data, to consider only the closest sensor reading, to consider all sensor readings separately to compute the resulting force vector, or to build a local map. The approach requires very little memory and computational resources, thus being implementable even on simpler robots moving in unknown environments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DIBRIS, University of Genova, Genova, Italy

    Antonio Sgorbissa & Renato Zaccaria

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  1. Antonio Sgorbissa
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  2. Renato Zaccaria
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Correspondence to Antonio Sgorbissa.

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Sgorbissa, A., Zaccaria, R. Integrated Obstacle Avoidance and Path Following Through a Feedback Control Law. J Intell Robot Syst 72, 409–428 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-012-9806-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-012-9806-2

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