An Innovative Time-of-Flight Based Robotic Navigation System

This paper describes an innovative solution in the field of navigation systems, in particular for obstacle avoidance with Time-of-Flight (TOF) sensor(s). It is inspired by a “divide and conquer” like idea. Obstacle avoidance consists in choosing the correct robot rotation angle to avoid impact with (moving) objects. The solution used is based on a simple state machine based only on “turn” and “go straight” commands. The system resets the chosen direction each time the robot moves forward to avoid potential rotation loops and unpleasant rotations. The other innovation consists in dividing into <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$N$</tex> vertical parts the TOF(s) we are considering and calculating separately a measure of each part. The combination of these values (the measure calculated on each part and chosen direction) will determine the output rotation to avoid the obstacle. Moreover, a peculiar preprocessing is done at the beginning to increase performance. The system works in real-time also in a dynamic environment and can be easily adapted to different TOF-like sensors.