Fuzzy logic based robot navigation in uncertain environments by multisensor integration

Abstract

This paper presents a strategy for fuzzy logic based robot navigation in uncertain environments by multisensor integration. The main idea of the study is to coordinate conflicts and competitions among multiple reactive behaviors efficiently by fuzzy sets and a rule base. To achieve this objective, an array of ultrasonic sensors and a vision system are mounted on a mobile robot. The ultrasonic sensors provide distance information between the robot and obstacles for behavior control of the mobile robot, while the vision system identifies some subgoals for determining a good motion direction to avoid robot trap in local region. The simulation results show that the proposed strategy, by integrating ultrasonic sensors and the vision system, can be efficiently applied to robot navigation in complex and uncertain environments by using different behaviors, such as avoiding obstacles, decelerating at curved and narrow roads, escaping from a U-shaped object, and moving to a target