This paper presents integrated path planning and collision avoidance for an omni-directional mobile robot. In this scheme, the autonomous mobile robot finds the shortest path by the descendent gradient of a navigation function to reach a goal. In doing so, the robot based on the proposed approach attempts to overcome some of the typical problems that may pose to the conventional robot navigation. In particular, this paper presents a set of analysis for an omni-directional mobile robot to avoid trapped situations for two representative scenarios: 1) Ushaped deep narrow obstacle and 2) narrow passage problem between two obstacles. The proposed navigation scheme eliminates the nonfeasible area for the two cases by the help of the descendent gradient of the navigation function and the characteristics of an omni-directional mobile robot. The simulation results show that the proposed navigation scheme can effectively construct a path-planning system in the capability of reaching a goal and avoiding obstacles despite possible trapped situations under uncertain world knowledge.