Abstract—An important expectation from a mobile robot is to be able to navigate in unexplored areas in the presence of unknown obstacles. Despite the great deal of work in this field, this problem is still a challenge as the planning domain is highly complex. This challenge can be seen in the form of high-cost solutions, high computational cost or increasing rate of failure. In this paper, a fuzzy motion planning approach is presented for guiding a nonholonomic mobile robot in unknown environments. The fuzzy controller uses the readings of the robot’s sensor(s) in terms of total travelled distance, distance to the goal and the presence of obstacles in the vicinity of the robot; and computes the linear and angular velocity of the robot with a pre-defined frequency. The proposed method was tested through simulation as well as experimental studies on a TurtleBot in indoor environments. The simulation and experimental studies show the effective performance of the proposed approach in terms of solution cost, computational cost and failure rate.