Abstract

This paper presents an enhancement to the earlier developed Vector Field Histogram (VFH) method for mobile robot obstacle avoidance. The enhanced method, called VFH*, successfully deals with situations that are problematic for purely local obstacle avoidance algorithms. The VFH* method verifies that a particular candidate direction guides the robot around an obstacle. The verification is performed by using the A* search algorithm and appropriate cost and heuristic functions. 1. INTRODUCTION Many mobile robot systems combine a global pathplanning module with a local obstacle avoidance module to perform navigation. While the global path planner determines a suitable path based on a map of the environment, the obstacle avoidance algorithm determines a suitable direction of motion based on recent sensor data. Obstacle avoidance is performed locally in order to ensure that real-time constraints are satisfied. A fast update rate of the obstacle avoidance algorithm is required to allow the ...

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