Motion Planning Method for Mobile Robots in Large Scale Transportation Systems by Genetic Algorithms

Abstract

This paper discusses a motion planning method for mobile robots in large scale transportation systems such as transportation of parts in factory, wafers in semiconductor factory, inspection objects in hospital and so on. Recently, mobile robots in such systems have become complex with an increasing number of transships for transportation. The problem is to determine the appropriate traversal route for each mobile robots improving efficiency of transportation. First, this problem is divided into several zones in which Genetic algorithms are applied to search an optimal traversal route for each zones. Then, the results in all zones are combined to determine a total traversal route by Genetic algorithms. The proposed method enabled us to solve large scale transportation problem in practicable computing time for online use.