Motion Planning of an Autonomous Mobile Robot in Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Presented in this paper is a newly developed motion planning method of an autonomous mobile robot(MAR) which can be applied to flexible manufacturing systems(FMS). The mobile robot is designed for transporting tools and workpieces between a set-up station and machines according to production schedules of the whole FMS. The proposed method is implemented based on an earlier developed real-time obstacle avoidance method which employs Kohonen network for pattern classification of sonar readings and fuzzy logic for local path planning. Particulary, a novel obstacle avoidance method for moving objects using a collision index, collision possibility measure, is described. Our method has been tested on the SNU mobile robot. The experimental results show that the robot successfully navigates to its target while avoiding moving objects.