Autonomous mobile robots should have the capability of recognizing their environments and manoeuvring through those environments on the basis of their own judgement. Fuzzy control is suitable for autonomous mobile robot control where the amount of information to be handled is limited as much as possible and the processing is simple. Autonomous mobile control of a robot is derived from two kinds of controls: for obstacle avoidance and for guidance following an appropriate path to a destination point. Fuzzy control of a robot for obstacle avoidance based on finding permissible passageways using the edges between the floor and the wall or obstacles obtained by processing the image from a CCD camera in front of the robot is developed. Furthermore, guidance control of the robot over paths that are specified in terms of maps may be developed by a process that treats a wrong path as a virtual obstacle on the screen, and the robot advances in the designated direction when it reaches intersections. An autonomous fuzzy robot based on the above method is fabricated as a trial and its usefulness is demonstrated.
展开▼
