GA-Based optimal waypoint design for improved path following of mobile robot

Abstract

Mobile robot can follow the planned path using a waypoint following guidance scheme. As this type of guidance scheme only uses the position of waypoints to navigate the path, the waypoint following is relatively simple and efficient to implement. However, it is non-trivial to determine the number and size of waypoints, which heavily affect the performance of robot. Thus, we tackle the problem of finding the optimal number and size of waypoints in this paper. For this optimization problem, we use genetic algorithm, where the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified in MATLAB simulation. The proposed method shows that mobile robot effectively navigates the planned path and successfully reaches the destination with the minimum path following error and travel time.