Human Expertise in Mobile Robot Navigation

Numerous applications, such as material handling, manufacturing, security, and automated transportation systems, use mobile robots. Autonomous navigation remains one of the primary challenges of the mobile robot industry; many new control algorithms have been recently developed that aim to overcome this challenge. These algorithms are primarily related by their adoption of new strategies for avoiding obstacles and minimizing the travel time to a target along an optimal path. In this paper, we introduce four different navigation systems for an autonomous mobile robot (PowerBot) and compare them. The four systems are based on a fuzzy logic controller (FLC). The FLC of one system is tuned by an inexperienced human (naive), while the three other FLCs are optimized through a genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and a human expert. We hope the comparison answers the question of which is the best controller. In other words, “who can win?,”the naive, the GA, the PSO, or the expert, in fine tuning the membership functions of the navigation and obstacle avoidance behavior of the mobile robot? To answer this question, we used four different techniques for optimization (the naive FLC, GA, PSO, and FLC-expert) and used many criteria for comparison, whereas other research papers have dealt with two techniques at a time.