Industrial robot navigation and obstacle avoidance employing fuzzy logic

This paper proposes a novel conceptual approach based on fuzzy logic to solve the local navigation and obstacle avoidance problem for industrial 3-dof robotic manipulators. The proposed system is divided into separate fuzzy units, which control individually each manipulator link. The fuzzy rule-base of each unit combines a repelling influence, which is related to the distance between the manipulator and the nearby obstacles, with the attracting influence produced by the angular difference, between the actual and the final manipulator configuration, to generate a new actuating command for each link. It can be considered as an on-line local navigation method for the generation of instantaneous collision-free trajectories. The strategy has been successfully applied to manipulators in different simulated workspace environments providing collision-free paths. Some of the simulation results obtained are included.