Fuzzy reactive control of wheeled mobile robot

This paper proposes a sensor based navigation method with a fuzzy combiner for navigation of a mobile robot in uncertain environments. We discuss a fuzzy approach to path design and control of simple individual behaviours of a wheeled mobile robot in an unknown 2D environment with static obstacles. A strategy of reactive navigation is developed including three main behaviours: reaching the middle of a collision-free space behaviour, goal-seeking behaviour and wall-following behaviour. These simple individual behaviours are achieved by means of fuzzy inference systems. It is assumed that each low-level behaviour has been well developed at the design stage and then fused by the fuzzy combiner of behaviours to determine proper actions acting on the environment at the running stage. The fuzzy combiner can fuse low-level behaviours so that the mobile robot can go for the goal position without colliding with obstacles. The fuzzy combiner is a soft switch that chooses more than one low-level action to be active with different degrees through fuzzy combination at each time step. The output of the navigation level is fed into a fuzzy tracking controller that takes into account the dynamics of the mobile robot. A computer simulation have been conducted to illustrate the performance of the proposed fuzzy combiner of behaviours by a series of experiments on an emulator of the wheeled mobile robot Pioneer-2DX.