Industrial robot navigation and obstacle avoidance employing fuzzy logic

This paper proposes a novel conceptual approach based on fuzzy logic to sol ve the local navigation and obstacle avoidance problem for industrial 3-dof robotic manipulators. The proposed system is divided into separate fuzzy u nits, which control individually each manipulator link. The fuzzy rule-base of each unit combines a repelling influence, which is related to the dista nce between the manipulator and the nearby obstacles, with the attracting i nfluence produced by the angular difference, between the actual and the fin al manipulator configuration, to generate a new actuating command for each link. It can be considered as an on-line local navigation method for the ge neration of instantaneous collision-free trajectories. The strategy has bee n successfully applied to manipulators in different simulated workspace env ironments providing collision-free paths. Some of the simulation results ob tained are included.