A Novel Method for Target Tracking and Obstacle Avoidance in Dynamic Environments

This paper deals with mobile robot navigation in an unknown environment. The proposed algorithm is inspired from artificial potential field (APF) and rotational force method. In the proposed algorithm, the robot’s velocity vector is simply determined by relative position vector of robot with respect to target and obstacles. This algorithm is applicable to both stationary and dynamic environments with one or more obstacles and guarantees that the robot can safely track the moving target even in the conditions of local minima or goal not reachable with obstacle nearby. In order to make the simulation more practical, it is applied to wheeled mobile robot. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.