Fuzzy motion planning among dynamic obstacles using artificial potential fields for robot manipulators

This paper focuses on autonomous motion planning of manipulators in known environments and with unknown dynamic obstacles. The navigation technique of robot control using artificial potential functions is based on fuzzy logic and stability is guaranteed by Lyapunov theory. A fuzzy logic system or fuzzy system is a universal approximator which provides a rule-based mapping between the input and the output space, while classical approaches make use of analytic harmonic functions to solve the navigation problem. In this particular application, the fuzzy system proposed is used to approximate the gradient of the harmonic functions. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.