Motion Planning and Control for Mobile Robot with SOFM

Despite the many significant advances made in robot architecture, the basic approaches are deliberative and reactive methods. They are quite different in recognizing outer environment and inner operating mechanism. For this reason, they have almost opposite characteristics. Later, researchers integrate these two approaches into hybrid architecture. In such architecture, Reactive module also called low-level motion control module have advantage in real-time reacting and sensing outer environment; Deliberative module also called high-level task planning module is good at planning task using world knowledge, reasoning and intelligent computing. This paper presents a framework of the integrated planning and control for mobile robot navigation. Unlike the existing hybrid architecture, it learns topological map from the world map by using MST (Minimum Spanning Tree)-based SOFM (Self-Organizing Feature Map) algorithm. High-level planning module plans simple tasks to low-level control module and low-level control module feedbacks the environment information to high-level planning module. This method allows for a tight integration between high-level and low-level modules, which provide real-time performance and strong adaptability and reactivity to outer environment and its unforeseen changes. This proposed framework is verified by simulation.