Robot follows a path near an obstacle without colliding I have a problem that I would like to solve it. A robot have to move near an obstacle (e.g a wall) without colliding. He should also try to be always near the obstacle.
The following picture can help you to understand what I need to do:




In red is the wall
Black dots is the robot moving
The dashed line is the path of the robot


The robot doesn’t have any information about the wall. He has only a sensor that can tell him approximately what the distance to the wall is.
A perfect robot is a robot who can move within a distance of 1m to the wall.  The robot some times doesn’t respect that distance:


The distance can be sometimes  > 1m
The distance can be less often &lt; 1m
The robot can collide but it should be very rare and it is better to
avoid it all the time.


Do you have a solution for this problem? 
I am new to AI and there is a lot of material to read. So on which topic of AI should I concentrate to find a solution for this problem?
Robot Motion Planning is an important topic in Computational Geometry. There have been a lot of research in this field.

Here are some pointers that might help you:

Slide: http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/departments/d1/teaching/ss10/Seminar_CGGC/Slides/06_Bazhenova_RMP.pdf

Slide: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15381-s07/www/slides/020807motion.pdf

Book: http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;id=_VRM_sczrKgC&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PR11&amp;dq=robot+motion+planning&amp;ots=zFkR07oxBJ&amp;sig=efsVfaDPAlhKgxZwClKS136moCI#v=onepage&amp;q=robot%20motion%20planning&amp;f=false

Website: http://correll.cs.colorado.edu/?p=965