D²WA: "dynamic" DWA for motion planning of mobile robots in dynamic environments

The paper presents a novel method called D(2)WA for local planning of mobile robots in indoor environments with moving obstacles. The first "dynamic" in the title has twofold meanings: (1) The proposed motion planning method is applied for dynamic environments, which is the key difference between D(2)WA and the traditional dynamic window approach (DWA). (2) The weight of the cost function related to dynamic obstacles is dynamically adjustable according to different moving obstacles, which can avoid unnecessary collision avoidance. The specific novelties of this work are: (1) Obstacle state information is taken into account in the cost function for the first time, which improves the predictability of dynamic obstacles for the motion planner. (2) A cost function with dynamically adjustable weight is designed, which prevents unnecessary collision avoidance. Different simulation scenarios with moving obstacles are presented to verify the proposed method. Relevant evaluation metrics are designed and compared with the traditional DWA. The simulation results show that the safety is improved by 50% compared to DWA. Comparative experiment results with DWA in the indoor corridor show the proposed method can effectively improve the navigation safety of mobile robots.