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Artificial Potential Filed (APF) is the most well-known method that is used in mobile robot path planning, however, the shortcoming is that the local minima. To overcome this issue, we present a deadlock free APF based path planning algorithm for mobile robot navigation. The Proposed-APF (P-APF) algorithm searches the goal point in unknown 2D environments. This method is capable of escaping from deadlock and non-reachability problems of mobile robot navigation. In this method, the effective front-face obstacle information associated with the velocity direction is used to modify the Traditional APF (T-APF) algorithm. This modification solves the deadlock problem that the T-APF algorithm often converges to local minima. The proposed algorithm is explained in details and to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, the simulation experiments were carried out in the MATLAB environment. Furthermore, the numerical analysis of the proposed approach is given to prove a deadlock free motion of the mobile robot.

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With regard to the current sewer pipe inspection technology, all commercial robots are completely tele-operated, usually via a tether cable, by a human operator. In addition, current sewer inspection robots have a poor mobility function to pass any kind of pipe-bends such as curves and junctions so that those robots are only capable to move into the straight pipes. Inspecting the sewage pipes using the state of the arts inspection methods by the current robots is costly, mostly human cost, and not fast enough to check and inspect the amount of sewage pipes will grow stronger than it has actually happened, specially in Japan. In this paper we propose an innovative, fast and robust sewer inspection method by using a passive-active intelligent, fully autonomous, un-tethered robot called "KANTARO" which fits to the pipes within a diameter range of 200-300 millimeters. KANTARO prototype robot, including a novel passive-active intelligent moving mechanism, can move into the straight pipe and pass different kinds of pipe bends without need to any intelligence of the controller or sensor reading. In order to realize a fully autonomous inspection robot, we also developed a small and intelligent 2D laser scanner for detecting of the navigational landmarks such as manholes and pipe joints independently with main computer system, and fusion with a fish eye camera to assist the pipe state and fault detection.

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