Obstacle Avoidance Using Multiobjective Optimization and a Dynamic Obstacle Manager

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This paper describes a set of software modules and algorithms for obstacle avoidance. The approach described here is designed to work in conjunction with any path planning method that generates a viable sequence of waypoints, with obstacle avoidance regarded as a local deviation of the planned path of points. The helm architecture used here will temporarily spawn a new obstacle avoidance behavior for each near detected obstacle, and generate a maneuvering objective function to avoid the obstacle. Once the vehicle passes the obstacle, the helm deletes the behavior and frees its memory space. The helm, obstacle manager, and obstacle avoidance behavior are described here. This software arrangement was used by the MIT 2014 RobotX team, and will be included in the next software release of the open source MOOS-IvP marine autonomy project.