Journal of the Chinese Institute of Engineers, Vol. 30, No. 3, pp.

369-377 (2007)

369

A POTENTIAL FIELD METHOD FOR ROBOT MOTION PLANNING IN UNKNOWN ENVIRONMENTS

Li-Chun Lai, Chia-Ju Wu, and Yeong-Long Shiue*

ABSTRACT
Based on a potential field function, a method is proposed to navigate a mobile robot from a given initial configuration to a desired final configuration in an unknown environment filled with obstacles. To determine its configuration accurately, the robot is equipped with an electronic compass and two optical encoders for deadreckoning, an ultrasonic module for self-localization, and a time-of-flight (TOF) laser range finder for environment recognition. From the readings of sensors at every sampling instant, the proposed method will determine the heading direction of the robot. Then the robot is driven to an intermediate configuration along the heading direction. The navigation procedure will be iterated until a collision-free path between the initial and the final configurations is found. To show the feasibility and validity of the proposed method, simulation and experimental results are included for illustration. Key Words: mobile robot, motion planning, potential field, dead-reckoning, selflocalization.

I. INTRODUCTION In the research field of mobile robots, a fast and efficient algorithm for motion planning plays an important role. Given the initial and the desired final configurations of a mobile robot in a working space, and given the description of obstacles in the space (this information may be complete or incomplete), the motion planning algorithm must be able to determine whether there is a continuous motion from one configuration to the other, and find such a motion if one exits. The earliest algorithms for motion planning problems of robots deal with navigation of a robot in a completely known environment filled with stationary obstacles (Gilbert and Johnson, 1985; Hwang and Ahuja, 1988; Rimon and Koditschek, 1992; Conte et al., 1996; Ge and Cui, 2000; Tsourveloudis et al., 2001;
*Corresponding author. (Email: syl@sunws.nfu.edu.tw) L. C. Lai is with the Graduate School of Engineering Science and Technology, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Yunlin 640, Taiwan, R.O.C. C. J. Wu is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Yunlin 640, Taiwan, R.O.C. Y. L. Shiue is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Formosa University, Yunlin 632, Taiwan, R.O.C.

Song and Kumar, 2002). Another kind of motion planning algorithm deals with navigation of a robot in a completely unknown environment (Baumagartner and Skaar, 1994; Figueroa and Mahajan, 1994; Tsugawa, 1994; Wu, 1995; Borenstein and Feng, 1996; Vandorpe et al., 1996; Li et al., 1997). Since the environment is unknown to the mobile robot, different sensors such as computer vision, ultrasonics, and odometers have been used in these algorithms, and each of these algorithms has shown its feasibility in different application areas. However, none of them have ever taken the techniques of dead-reckoning, selflocalization, and environment recognition into account simultaneously. Therefore, one goal of this paper is the integration of these three techniques such that the configuration of the mobile robot and the environment recognition can be determined more accurately. In this paper, the mobile robot will be equipped with two optical encoders for dead-reckoning. However, dead-reckoning is subject to accumulative errors caused by wheel slippage, mechanical tolerances, and surface roughness. Therefore, to compensate for the inaccuracy of dead-reckoning, ultrasonic self-localization (Wu and Tsai, 2001) will be adopted. Ultrasonic sensors are used since they have been proven to be very useful, economical external

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sensing systems for localization of mobile robots (Tsai, 1998). Moreover, the mobile robot has a TOF laser range finder to detect possible obstacles for environment recognition. In fusing the information obtained from different sensors, the well-known extended Kalman filter algorithm is used to increase the accuracy of sensor measurements. In addition to the integration of dead-reckoning, self-localization, and environment recognition techniques, a novel potential field method to navigate a mobile robot in an unknown environment is also proposed in this paper. The basic concept is to fill the working space of the robot with an artificial potential field in which the robot is attracted to its goal position and is repulsed from obstacles (Latombe, 1991). The potential field method is particularly attractive because of its mathematical elegance and simplicity, and has been studied extensively for mobile robot motion planning in the past decade (Hwang and Ahuja, 1988; Borenstein and Koren, 1989; Latombe, 1991; Koren and Borenstein, 1991; Rimon and Koditschek, 1992; Chuang and Ahuja, 1998; Ge and Cui, 2000; Tsourveloudis et al., 2001; Song and Kumar, 2002). While each of the previous methods has its own merit, the common problem is that most of them are suitable for motion planning of mobile robots in completely known environments only. Therefore, another goal of this paper is the development of a novel potential field method that is applicable to robot motion planning in an unknown environment. The remaining sections of this paper are organized as follows. Section II shows the block diagram and the kinematics of the mobile robot. Meanwhile, it also describes briefly the procedures of deadreckoning, self-localization, and environment recognition. Section III presents the novel potential field method for robot motion planning in an unknown environment. Experiments are performed in Section IV to confirm the feasibility of the proposed algorithm. Section V concludes the paper. II. THE MOBILE ROBOT SYSTEM 1. Block Diagram of The System Figures 1 and 2 describe the appearance and the block diagram of the mobile robot system, respectively. The robot has two independently driven front wheels and two freely rotating back wheels, and its size is 56 cm (L) 50 cm (W) 52 cm (H). The dead-reckoning module in Fig. 2 consists of a flux compass with one-degree resolution and two-degree accuracy, and two high-resolution optical encoders mounted on the robot wheels. The compass provides a measure of the orientation of the robot by sensing the strength of the earths magnetic field. The optical encoders

Fig. 1 Appearance of the mobile robot system

provide a measure of the rotation angle of the motors. Combining the readings of these two kinds of sensors, the dead-reckoning procedure is executed to determine the position and the orientation of the mobile robot. The ultrasonic module in Fig. 3 is for the purpose of self-localization. The ultrasonic module consists of three RF-controlled ultrasonic transmitters fixed on known locations with respect to a reference frame, and two ultrasonic receivers placed on the mobile robot as shown in Fig. 3. By measuring the six sets of TOF data between all possible pairs of transmitter and receiver, the position and the orientation of the mobile robot can be determined accurately such that the possible accumulative errors due to dead-reckoning can be eliminated. For details of this self-localization procedure, please refer to (Wu and Tsai, 2001). The laser range finder mounted on the robot is the LMS 291 model produced by the SICK Company. Maximal measuring range of this laser is adjustable and up to 80 m. Meanwhile, its angular resolution and measuring accuracy are 1 and 10 mm, respectively. In this research, this laser will be used to scan the area in front of the mobile robot to detect possible obstacles. 2. Kinematics of The Mobile Robot By assuming that the wheels do not slip, the kinematics of the mobile robot can be obtained as (Wu and Tsai, 2001; Tsai, 1998)
x(t) = R ( R(t) + L(t)) cos (t) , 2r

(1) (2)

y(t) = R ( R(t) + L(t)) sin (t) , 2r

and

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Dead-reckoning module (An electronic compass and two optical encoders)

Self-localization module (Ultrasonic sensors)

Environment recognition module (A TOF laser range finder)

Interface Bus

Notebook computer

Potential field method for navigation

DC motor controller

Power amplifer

Right wheel Left wheel

Fig. 2 Block diagram of the mobile robot system

Zref

yref

y
yref : Transmitters : Receivers

x
xref

xref

Fig. 4

Definitions of the position and the orientation of the mobile robot

Mobile robot

Fig. 3

Physical configuration of the ultrasonic module for selflocalization. Three RF-controlled ultrasonic transmitters are installed at fixed positions of the reference frame and two ultrasonic receivers are mounted on the mobile robot.

velocities of the right and left wheels, respectively, R represents the radius of the drive wheels, r denotes the gear ratio of the motor, and b represents the distance between the driven wheels. Thus, the linear velocity of the robot is given using
v(t) = x(t) 2 + y(t) 2 = R ( R(t) + L(t)) . 2r

(4)

(t) = R ( R(t) L(t)) , br

(3)

where x(t), y(t), and (t) denote the position and the orientation of the robot with respect to a reference frame as shown in Fig. 4, R (t) and L (t) are the angular

From (1), (2), and (3), one finds that there are two parameters to be controlled in the navigation process, namely R (t) and L (t), respectively. For convenience of practical implementation, the control strategy in this paper is to keep the value of v(t) constant during the navigation procedure. If

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R ( (t) + (t)) = v L const 2r R

(5)

then (1), (2), and (3) can be rewritten as . x(t) = vconst . cos (t), . y(t) = v const . sin (t), and
(t) = 2 vconst 2R L(t) . b br

(6) (7)

In the previous research on potential field methods, for simplicity, a robot is usually treated as a point. If the position of the robot is denoted by [xr, y r], then the most commonly used attractive potential field between a robot and an obstacle takes the following form (Borenstein and Koren, 1989; Latombe, 1991; Koren and Borenstein, 1991)
U att = 1 [(xr xg) 2 + (yr yg) 2] , 2

(9)

(8)

Based on the above three equations, one only needs to determine the value of L (t) in the navigation process. Once its value is determined, then the value of R(t) is determined from (5). In this manner, the task of controller design will be simplified. The outputs of the DC motor controller in Fig. 2 are the control voltages to the left and right wheels, respectively. III. POTENTIAL FIELD FOR MOTION PLANNING 1. Review of Previous Research

where is a positive scaling factor and [xg, yg] denotes the position of the goal point. The corresponding attractive force is then given by the negative gradient of the attractive potential field
xg xr Fatt = U att = y y , g r

(10)

which converges linearly toward zero as the robot approaches the goal. On the other hand, one commonly used repulsive potential field between a robot and an obstacle takes the following form (Latombe, 1991)

U rep =

1 ( 1 1 ) 2, if (xr xobs) 2 + (yr yobs) 2 2 (xr xobs) 2 + (yr yobs) 2 0, otherwise

(11)

where is a positive scaling factor, is a positive constant denoting the distance of influence of the obstacle, and [x obs, y obs] denotes the point on the ob-

stacle such that the distance (xr xobs) 2 + (yr yobs) 2 is minimal. The corresponding repulsive force is then given by

Frep = U rep =

Frep, x , if (xr xobs) 2 + (yr yobs) 2 Frep, y 0, otherwise

(12)

where
Frep, x = (

Frep, y = (

1 1) (xr xobs) 2 + (yr yobs) 2

1 1) (xr xobs) 2 + (yr yobs) 2

(xr xobs) (xr xobs) 2 + (yr yobs) 2

(yr yobs) (xr xobs) 2 + (yr yobs) 2

(13)

1 (xr xobs) 2 + (yr yobs) 2

(14)

1 (xr xobs) 2 + (yr yobs) 2

The total force applied to the robot is the sum of the

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attractive force and the repulsive force F total = F att + F rep (15)

W (xg, yg) L/2

which determines the movement of the robot. It should be noted that if there multiple obstacles in the working space, then (12) will be applied to each obstacle to generate a repulsive force. These forces are then summed to obtain the total repulsive force. For the potential field defined in (9) through (15), there exist several disadvantages. The first one is that the robot should not be treated as a point since a robot has a certain size in practice. The second one is the difficulty in determining [x obs, y obs] since it is not easy to distinguish one obstacle from another in an unknown environment. In addition to the above disadvantages, there also exists a problem called GNRON (Goal Non-Reachable with Obstacle Nearby). This problem occurs when the goal is very close to an obstacle. When the robot approaches its goal, it approaches the obstacle as well. As a consequence, the attractive force decreases, while the repulsive force increases. Thus, the robot will be repulsed rather than reaching the goal. For example, if [x r , y r ] = [0.5, 0], [x g, y g] = [0, 0], [x obs, y obs ] = [0.5, 0], = 1, = 1, and = 2 then the total force becomes zero and the robot cannot reach the goal though there is no obstacle in its way. A simple and effective way to solve the GNRON problem is to consider the attractive force only if [x g, y g] is reachable from [x r , y r ]. It is easy to check reachability if the robot is treated as a point. However, if the actual size of the robot is taken into account, then the checking will be a difficult task. 2. A Novel Potential Field Method

Region B

^ L

Region C

Region A

(xr, yr)

Fig. 5

Illustration of the checking of reachability. L and W denote the length and the width of the robot, respectively, and L = (xr xg) 2 + (yr yg) 2 + L . The goal [x g, y g] will 2 be reachable from [x r , y r ] if there are no obstacles in regions A, B, and C.

account, how to use the laser to check the reachability from [xr, yr] to [xg, yg] is illustrated in Fig. 5, in which the length and the width of the robot are denoted by L and W, respectively. If the laser range finder cannot detect any obstacles in regions A, B, and C, then one can conclude that [x g, y g] is reachable from [x r, y r]. From the illustration of Fig. 5, one can find easily that region A will be obstacle-free if the following inequality is satisfied, d i . cos i W for 0 i , 2 where (16)

To cope with the above-mentioned disadvantages, a laser range finder as shown in Fig. 1 will be used in the proposed potential field method. This laser range finder scans the area in front of the mobile robot with the resolution of one degree to detect possible obstacles. Therefore, corresponding to the scanning area, 181 directions are defined and denoted by i, i = 0, 1, ... , 180, where i = . i (rad). Corresponding to each 180 direction i, a parameter di will be determined, which denotes the distance of the obstacle that is measured by the laser range finder when the robot performs the scanning in the direction i. During each scanning process, 181 sets of data, (d i , i ), i = 0, 1, ... , 180, will be generated and the repulsive force is then determined from these data. Since there is no need to determine [x obs, y obs], one disadvantage of other potential field methods can be eliminated. When the actual size of the robot is taken into

= tan 1

2 (xr xg) 2 + (yr yg) 2 + L . W

(17)

Similarly, region C is obstacle-free if di . cos i W for i . 2 In the same manner, region B is obstacle-free if
d i sini (xr xg) 2 + (yr yg) 2 + L 2

(18)

for i .

(19)

Based on the above illustration, a novel potential field will be proposed, in which total force is represented as

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Ftotal =

xg xr if [xg, yg] is reachable from [xr, yr] yg yr , xg xr 180 1 1 cosi yg yr i0 k i ( d i d max ) sini , otherwise =

(20)

where d max is the maximal measuring range of the laser range finder, and k i , i = 0, 1, ... , 180, are the weighting factors to be determined. With the above illustrations and definitions, the details of the proposed potential field method can be summarized as follows: Algorithm A: Step 1. Given the initial and the desired final configurations. Step 2. Set j = 0. Step 3. Set t = j . t, where t is the length of the sampling period. Step 4. Integrate the dead-reckoning technique and the self-localization technique to determine the value of [x r(t), y r(t)]. Step 5. Use the laser range finder to determine the values of (d i(t), i(t)), i = 0, 1, ... , 180. Step 6. Use (16) through (19) to determine whether [x g, y g] is reachable from [x r(t), y r(t)] or not. Then determine the corresponding F total according to (20). Step 7. The robot is driven to move in the direction F total. Step 8. If the goal configuration is reached, then end. Otherwise, set j = j + 1 and go back to Step 3. 3. Determination of Weighting Factors The weighting factors ki, i = 0, 1, ..., 180, play an important role in the proposed potential field method. If their values are very small, then only the influence of the attractive force will be taken into account. On the other hand, if their values are quite large, then the attractive force will be neglected. However, there is no systematic way to determine their values. Therefore, a genetic algorithm (GA) is adopted to serve this purpose. The theoretical basis of GAs is that chromosomes (solutions) better suited to the environment (evaluation) will have a greater chance of survival and a better chance of producing offspring. The evolutionary process is based primarily on the mutation and crossover operators. The crossover operator combines the features of two parents to form two offspring. The mutation operator arbitrarily alters one or more genes of a selected chromosome, which increases the variability of the population. In this paper, the fitness function

to be maximized is defined as
fitness = 1 . length of the navigation path

(21)

In the evolutionary process, to maximize the fitness function, genetic operators such as real number encoding, arithmetical crossover and non-uniform mutation will be implemented. Moreover, enlarged sampling space and a ranking mechanism will also be used to expedite the convergence of the evolutionary process. (i) Chromosome, Crossover, and Mutation In this paper, since the parameters to be determined are all real, real number encoding will be used. Therefore, a chromosome will be denoted by x = [x 0, x 1, ... , x180], in which x i, i = 0, 1, ... , 180, are all real numbers. Based on this representation, arithmetical crossover and non-uniform mutation will be introduced (Gen and Cheng, 1997). For two real-coded chromosomes x 1 and x 2, the operation of arithmetical crossover is defined as follows: x = x 1 + (1 )x 2, 1 and x = x 2 + (1 )x 1, 2 (23) (22)

where (0, 1). For a given parent x, if a gene xi from it is selected for mutation, then the resulting offspring will be randomly selected from one of the following two choices,
xi = xi + (xiU xi) rand (1
xi = xi (xi xiL) rand (1

gen dnu ) G
gen dnu ) , G

(24) (25)

where xU and x L are the upper and lower bounds of xi; i i rand is a random number from [0, 1]; gen is the generation number; G is the maximal generation number, and dnu is a parameter determining the degree of nonuniformity. (ii) Enlarge Sampling Space To generate good offspring, a method for

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y (meter) 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 x (meter) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

y (meter) 7 6
(10 m, 5.5 m)

5 4 3 2 1
(1 m, 0.5 m)

x (meter) 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Fig. 6

A plane filled with obstacles, which is used as the unknown environment in the simulation example.

Fig. 7

selection of parents will be necessary. For selection methods that are developed based on regular sampling space, parents are replaced by their offspring soon after they give birth. In this manner, some fitter chromosomes will be worse than their parents. To cope with this problem, the selection method in this paper will be performed in an enlarged sampling space, in which both parents and offspring have the same chance to compete for survival. Moreover, since more random perturbation is allowed in the enlarged sampling space, high crossover and mutation rates will be allowed in the evolutionary process. (iii) Ranking Mechanism In proportional selection, the selection probability of a chromosome is proportional to its fitness. This scheme exhibits some undesirable properties such as a few super chromosomes will dominate the process of selection in early generations. Moreover, competition among chromosomes will be less strong and a random search behavior will emerge in later generations. Therefore, the ranking mechanism is used in this paper to mitigate these problems, in which the chromosomes are selected proportional to their ranks rather than actual evaluation values. This means that the fitness will be an integer number from 1 to P, where P is the population size. The best chromosomes will have a fitness value of P and the worst one will have a fitness value of 1. The details of the determination of the weighting factors can be summarized as follows: Algorithm B: Step 1. Define the fitness function as shown in (21). Step 2. Determine the population size, the crossover rate and the mutation rate. Step 3. Produce an initial generation in a random way. Step 4. Evaluate the fitness for each member of the first generation according to the procedure

The navigation path from the initial configuration (1 m, 0.5 m) to the final configuration (10 m, 5.5 m). When applying Algorithm B to generate this shortest-length path, the weighting factors k i , i = 0, 1, ... , 180, are also determined simultaneously.

described in Algorithm A. Step 5. With the crossover rate in Step 2, generate offspring according to (22) and (23), in which the ranking mechanism is used for selection of chromosomes. Step 6. With the mutation rate in Step 2, generate offspring according to (24) and (25). Step 7. Select the members of the new generation from the parents in the old generation and the offspring in Step 5 and Step 6 according to their fitness values. Step 8. Repeat the procedure in Step 5 through Step 7 until the number of generations reaches a prescribed value. IV. SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS Example 1. In this simulation example, it will be shown how to apply Algorithm B to determine the weighting factors ki, i = 0, 1, ..., 180. When performing the proposed navigation algorithm, the value of d max in (20) is set to be 8 m and the plane shown in Fig. 6 is used as the completely unknown environment. The initial and final configurations are chosen to be [x r , y r] = [1 m, 0.5 m] and [x g , y g] = [10 m, 5.5 m] respectively. In applying Algorithm B, the population size, the number of generations, the crossover rate, and the mutation rate are chosen to be 200, 50, 0.8, and 0.01, respectively, and the fitness function is defined as in (21). Performing Algorithm B with the above parameters, the values of k i , i = 0, 1, ... , 180, will be determined and the navigation path with the shortest length is shown in Fig. 7. Example 2. In this experimental example, the proposed potential field method will be performed in the laboratory shown in Fig. 8, which is filled

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Journal of the Chinese Institute of Engineers, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2007)

A
: Obstacles : Walls

: Obstacles : Walls

Fig. 8

Top view of the laboratory for navigation experiment. The size of the laboratory is 1330 cm(L) 960 cm(W) and it is filled with unknown obstacles such as tables, chairs, and so on.

Fig. 9

The navigation path of the robot from the initial configuration (3.5 m, 2 m) to the final configuration (7.5 m, 11 m).

with unknown obstacles. In performing the experiment, the weighting factors k i, i = 0, 1, ... , 180 determined in Example 1 and the same value of d max were used. The task of the mobile robot is to move from the initial configuration [x r, y r] = [3.5 m, 2 m] to the final configuration [x g, y g] = [7.5 m, 11 m] in a collisionfree manner. During the navigation procedure, the mobile robot moves at the speed of 20 cm/s, performs the dead-reckoning procedure 50 times/s, the self-localization procedure every 2 s, and the environment recognition procedure every second. The whole navigation procedure takes about 97 seconds and the navigation path is depicted as shown in Fig. 9. V. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS A robot system that integrates the techniques of dead-reckoning, self-localization, and environment recognition is proposed in this paper. Different sensors such as an electronic compass, two optical encoders, several ultrasonic sensors, and a laser range finder are used in this system. In this type of sensorintegration, both the configuration of the mobile robot and its recognition of the environment can be determined accurately. In addition to the robot system, the potential field method is also proposed for motion planning of the robot in an unknown environment. The proposed method checks whether the robot can reach the goal point or not. If it does, then the robot moves to the goal point directly. Otherwise, the heading direction of the robot at every sampling instant is determined. The robot is

then driven to an intermediate configuration along the heading direction. The navigation procedure will be iterated until the final configuration is reached. Compared with most other potential field functions, one can find that the proposed method has several advantages. The first one is that the proposed method can be used for robot motion planning in a completely known or unknown environment. The second one is that the actual size of the robot is taken into account rather than treating the robot as a point as in most other cases. The final one is the development of a simple and effective way to check the reachability to the goal such that the GNRON problem can be solved. Since the proposed method has these advantages, how to use it in more different applications is suggested as a topic for further study. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work was supported in part by the National Science Council, Taiwan, R.O.C., under grants NSC932213-E-224-001 and NSC93-2218-E-224-020. NOMENCLATURE d i, i = 0, 1, ... , 180 d max dnu F att F rep F total distances of the laser range finder to the obstacles (m) maximal measuring range of the laser range finder (m) degree of non-uniformity attractive force (Nt) repulsive force (Nt) total force (Nt)

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G gen k i, i = 0, 1, ... , 180 L P rand x = [x 0, x 1, ... , x 180] x U, x L i i [x r, y r] [x g, y g] [x obs, y obs] U att U rep W i, i = 0, 1, ... , 180

maximal generation number generation number weighting factors of the repulsive potential field length of the robot (m) population size random number from [0, 1] a chromosome upper and lower bounds of the gene x i position of the robot (m) position of the goal point (m) position of the obstacle (m) attractive potential field (J) repulsive potential field (J) width of the robot (m) scanning directions of the laser range finder (degree)

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