Landmark-Based Representations for Navigating Holonomic Soccer Robots

For navigating mobile robots the central problems of path planning and collision avoidance have to be solved. In this paper we propose a method to solve the (local) path planning problem in a reactive fashion given a landmark-based representation of the environment. The perceived obstacles define a point set for a Delaunay tessellation based on which a traversal graph containing possible paths to the target position is constructed. By applying A* we find a short and safe path through the obstacles. Although the traversal graph is recomputed in every iteration in order to achieve a high degree of reactivity the method guarantees stable paths in a static environment; oscillating behavior known from other local methods is precluded. This method has been successfully implemented on our Middle-size robots.