Design and evaluation of intelligent global path planning algorithms

Abstract

Global path planning is a crucial component for robot navigation in map-based environments. It consists in finding the shortest path between start and goal locations. The analysis of existing literature in Chap. 2 shows two main approaches commonly used to address the path planning problem: (1) exact methods and (2) heuristic methods. A* and Dijkstra are known to be the most widely used exact methods for mobile robot global path planning. On the other hand, several heuristic methods based on ant colony optimization (ACO), genetic algorithms (GA), Tabu Search (TS), and hybrid approaches of both have been proposed in the literature. One might wonder which of these methods is more effective for the robot path planning problem. Several questions also arise: Do exact methods consistently outperform heuristic methods? If so, why? Is it possible to devise more powerful hybrid approaches using the advantages of exact and heuristics methods? To the best of our knowledge, there is no comprehensive comparison between exact and heuristic methods in solving the path planning problem. This chapter fills the gap, addresses the aforementioned research questions, and proposes a comprehensive simulation study of exact and heuristic global path planners to identify the more appropriate technique for the global path planning.