VFH+: Reliable Obstacle Avoidance for Fast Mobile Robots

This paper presents further developments of the earlier Vector Field Histogram (VFH) method for real- time mobile robot obstacle avoidance. The enhanced method, called VFH+, offers several improvements that result in smoother robot trajectories and greater reliability. VFH+ reduces some of the parameter tuning of the original VFH method by explicitly compensating for the robot width. Also added in VFH+ is a better approximation of the mobile robot trajectory, which results in higher reliability.