This paper deals with the reactive navigation in clustered environment. It proposes an online and adaptive elliptic trajectory to perform smooth and safe mobile robot navigation. These trajectories use limit-cycle principle already applied in the literature [3]. The main contribution proposed here is to perform this navigation in a completely reactive way while using only range sensor data. At this aim, each obstacle to avoid is surrounded by an ellipse and its parameters are obtained online while using the sequential range data and appropriate method to identify the enclosed ellipse. Different methods to obtain these ellipse parameters are presented and implemented. A specific criterion is taken into account to obtain always smooth change in these parameters. A large number of simulations permit to show the efficiency of our proposal for the navigation in cluttered environment. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.