Page 247 - Concise Encyclopedia of Robotics

Uniform
Tangential
Repulsive radial Attractive radial Potential Field

Perpendicular

Potential field

Uniform field
In a uniform potential field, the vectors all point in the same direction and
have the same magnitude, regardless of the location of the robot.All of the
vectors point parallel to the work surface.An example of this sort of field is
a steady wind acting on a robot. Another example is Earth’s magnetic field
in a work space that covers only a small part of the surface of the planet (for
example, a few square kilometers), and which is located near the geomag-
netic equator where the lines of flux are parallel to the surface.
Attractive radial field
An attractive radial potential field contains vectors that all point inward
toward the origin, or center point, represented by (0, 0) in the Cartesian
coordinate system. The vector magnitude might depend on the distance

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