Sensor Perception and Motion Planning for an Autonomous Material Handling Vehicle

The ground mobile robotics study is structured on the two pivotal members namely Sensor Perception and Motion Planning. Sensor perception or Exteroception comprises the ability of measurement of the layout of the environment relative to vehicle's frame of reference which is a necessity for the implementation of safe navigation towards the goal destination in an unstructured environment. Environment scanning has played a significant role in mobile robots application to investigate the unexplored environment in the sector of defence while transporting and handling material in warehouse and hospitals. Motion Planning is a conjunction of analyzing the sensor's information while being able to plan the route from starting point to the target destination. In this paper, a 360⁰ 2-D LiDAR is used to capture the spatial information of the surrounding, the scanning results are presented in a local map and global map. The LiDAR’s output is further transformed into an Occupancy grid for the comprehension of the Motion planning module to process the path. Probabilistic Roadmap and Vector Field Histogram are two methods used for Motion Planning. The entire process of the graphical output of the map and simulations were carried out using Robotics System Toolbox in Matlab - Simulink.