A Hybrid Obstacle Avoidance Strategy Based on PSO in Source Location

This paper focuses on obstacle avoidance in the source location problem, in which robots capture the signal strength and find the signal source in an unknown environment. This work proposes a particle swarm optimizer (PSO) with a hybrid obstacle avoidance strategy to solve the problem. The signal strength is considered as the fitness function for PSO to guide robots. During moving, artificial potential fields are adopted to make robots avoid obstacles and each other. A deadlock escaping strategy is put forward to deal with the constraints of concave obstacles. The weighted average velocity of a robot is employed to check whether it is stuck by an obstacle. If so, a tabu area is set to push robots out of the area and prevent them from searching the same place again. These tabu areas offer robots key information about obstacles in an unknown environment and improve robots’ ability of obstacle avoidance. The proposed algorithm is adaptive in unknown environments, meaning that no prior knowledge is needed. Simulation tests verify the effectiveness of the developed algorithm, showing satisfactory performance when dealing with concave obstacles.