Patent ID: 9436187
Filing Date: 2016-09-06
CPC Classification: G01C,G05D

Claim Text:
1. A method for navigating a fleet of multiple unmanned vehicles from a first starting location to a second ending location via an initial pathway of waypoints, the iterative method for each of the unmanned vehicles comprising: accumulating sensor information representative of obstacle locations and boundaries of one or more sensed obstacles and vehicle locations of other sensed vehicles in the fleet between the first and second locations; calculating artificial potential field (APF) additive force vectors representative of virtual forces between each of the vehicles and between each vehicle and the sensed obstacles, including calculating when a force vector is zero which is representative of a local minimum; responsive to the local minimum, communicating to the fleet that a new path needs to be generated and generating a new path forward, including calculating one or more new path forward waypoints such that the local minimum is removed because of attraction to the new waypoints by calculating additive force vectors to remove the local minimum and attract the vehicle to the new waypoints around the sensed obstacles and the other sensed vehicles to the second location.