Development of General Search Based Path Follower in Real Time Environment

Mobile robots are being used for various industrial, medical, research and other applications to perform the various tasks accurately and efficiently. Path planning of such mobile robots plays a prominent role in performing these tasks. This paper deals with the path planning of mobile robots in a predefined structured environment. In this case the environment chosen is the roadmap of NIT Rourkela obtained from Google maps as reference. An Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) is developed and programmed so as to move autonomously from an indicated source location to the defined destination in the given map following the most optimal path among the available paths. The source and destination points are the different departments, academic blocks in NIT Rourkela campus map. In this case we use a two wheeled mobile robot consisting of IR sensors is used to verify the validation of the proposed algorithm. A linear search based algorithm is implemented on the autonomous robot to generate shortest paths in the NIT Rourkela campus map generated. The algorithm is similar to that of the right wall follower algorithm, Dijkstra algorithm etc. used in maze solving robots but in this case the paths treaded are not stored in the memory and the vehicle does not check the available paths to choose the shortest one, but chooses them with the aid of the information provided by the sensors. The coordinates of source and goal positions plays a prominent role in deciding the particular path at the branching node. This method saves the time and cost of following all the available paths to check if it is the shortest one. The results are verified with the simulations performed using MATLAB. Moreover experiments were performed on the developed model in the scaled version of NIT Rourkela campus map printed on a banner to compare and verify the result