Intelligent Path Planning Approach for Autonomous Mobile Robot

Abstract

This paper presents a new path planning algorithm for an autonomous mobile robot. It is desired that the robot reaches its goal in a known or partially known environment (e.g., a warehouse or an urban environment) and avoids collisions with walls and other obstacles. To this end, a new, efficient, simple, and flexible path finder strategy for the robot is proposed in this paper. With the proposed strategy, the optimal path from the robot’s current position to the goal position is guaranteed. The environment is represented as a grid-based map, which is then divided into a predefined number of subfields to reduce the number of required computations. This leads to a reduction in the load on the controller and allows a real-time response. To evaluate the flexibility and efficiency of the proposed strategy, several tests were simulated with environments of different sizes and obstacle distributions. The experimental results demonstrate the reliability and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.