Bioinspired Robot Path Planning using PointBug Algorithm

This paper is an outcome of a research implementation that was carried out on a BOEbot (Board Of Education bot) existing in the robotics laboratory of Computer Science and Engineering Department of Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology which resulted in the development of an essential algorithm that is primarily used to navigate a mobile robot in presence of a wide range of obstacles enabling the robot to move from starting location to a target location avoiding all the obstacles in between with the help of ultrasonic sensors. In order to achieve this it is utmost necessary to obtain a path that would avoid the obstacles that might be present in the static environments which in this paper is obtained using simple local path planning algorithm known as the PointBug algorithm. Initially the algorithm determines the next point for the robot to move forward to the target from any current point which depicts the starting point in the beginning. The next point is determined by the output of the range sensors which depicts the nearest obstacle distance from the sensor which can also be termed as sudden change which can be considered as increasing or decreasing by a considerable value Delta d which needs to be defined with accuracy.