Navigation of a wheeled robot in unknown environments is proposed in this paper. The approach may be applied to navigating an autonomous vehicle in unknown environments, such as parking lots. The navigation consists of three parts: obstacle avoidance behavior, target seeking behavior, and a behavior supervisor. The obstacle avoidance behavior is achieved by controlling the robot to move along an obstacle boundary through evolutionary fuzzy control. In the evolutionary fuzzy control approach, a Pareto set of fuzzy controllers (FCs) is found though a multi-objective continuous ant colony optimization algorithm. Target seeking behavior is achieved by controlling the robot through hybrid proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers. The behavior supervisor determines the switching between obstacle avoidance and target seeking behaviors, where the dead-cycle problem is considered. Simulations and experiments were performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed navigation scheme.

This paper proposes a fast navigation scheme for a wheeled robot in unknown environments. The navigation scheme consists of obstacle boundary following (OBF), target seeking (TS), and vertex point seeking (VPS) behaviors and a behavior supervisor. The OBF behavior is achieved by a fuzzy controller (FC). This paper formulates the FC design problem as a new constrained multiobjective optimization problem and finds a set of nondominated FC solutions through the combination of expert knowledge and data-driven multiobjective ant colony optimization. The TS behavior is achieved by new fuzzy proportional-integral-derivative (PID) and proportionalderivative (PD) controllers that control the orientation and speed of the robot, respectively. The VPS behavior is proposed to shorten the navigation route by controlling the robot to move toward a new subgoal determined from the vertex point of an obstacle. A new behavior supervisor that manages the switching among the OBF, TS, and VPS behaviors in unknown environments is proposed. In the navigation of a real robot, a new robot localization method through the fusion of encoders and an infrared localization sensor using a particle filter is proposed. Finally, this paper presents simulations and experiments to verify the feasibility and advantages of the fast navigation scheme.