15th Triennial World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control
  Barcelona, 21–26 July 2002 
A NEURAL COMPUTATION MODEL FOR REAL-TIME COLLISION-FREE ROBOT NAVIGATION
Simon X. Yang1, Max Meng2 and Hao Li1
1 Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems (ARIS) Lab
School of Engineering, University of Guelph
Guelph, ON N1G 2W1, Canada
2 Advanced Robotics and Teleoperation (ART) Lab
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2G7, Canada

A biologically inspired neural computation model is proposed for dynamic planning and tracking control of robots. The dynamic environment is represented by a neural activity landscape of a topologically organized neural network, where each neuron is characterized by a shunting equation. The collision-free path is generated in real-time through the activity landscape without any prior knowledge of the dynamic environment. The real-time tracking control of robots to follow the planned path is also designed using shunting equations. The effectiveness is demonstrated through case studies. Simulation in several computer-synthesized virtual environments further demonstrates the advantages of the proposed approach.
Keywords: path planning, obstacle avoidance, velocity control, neural dynamics, neural network
Session slot T-Th-E18: Intelligent Robotics/Area code 1d : Robotics