Artificial potential field neuro-fuzzy controller for autonomous navigation of mobile robots

Some autonomous navigation methods, when implemented alone, can lead to poor performance, whereas their combinations, when well thought out, can yield exceptional performances. We have demonstrated this by combining the artificial potential field and fuzzy logic methods in the framework of mobile robots’ autonomous navigation. In this article, we investigate a possible combination of three methods widely used in the autonomous navigation of mobile robots, and whose individual implementation still does not yield the expected performances. These are as follows: the artificial potential field, which is quick and easy to implement but faces local minima and robustness problems. Fuzzy logic is robust but computationally intensive. Finally, neural networks have an exceptional generalization capacity, but face data collection problems for the learning base and robustness. This article aims to exploit the advantages offered by each of these approaches to design a robust, intelligent, and computationally efficient controller. The combination of the artificial potential field and interval type-2 fuzzy logic resulted in an interval type-2 fuzzy logic controller whose advantage over the classical interval type-2 fuzzy logic controller was the small size of the rule base. However, it kept all the classical interval type-2 fuzzy logic controller characteristics, with the major disadvantage that type-reduction remains the main cause of high computation time. In this article, the type-reduction process is replaced with two layers of neural networks. The resulting controller is an interval type-2 fuzzy neural network controller with the artificial potential field controller’s outputs as auxiliary inputs. The results obtained by performing a series of experiments on a mobile platform demonstrate the proposed navigation system’s efficiency.