An Improved Artificial Electric Field Algorithm for Robot Path Planning

Abstract

Effectively improving the optimization performance of artificial electric field algorithm (AEFA) and broadening its application domain can aid in providing robot path planning in three-dimensional (3D) complex scenes. This paper effectively proposes an improved AEFA (I-AEFA) and creatively applies it to robot path planning. The algorithm introduces three mechanisms to enhance the exploration ability and convergence accuracy of the population: parameter adaptation, reverse learning, and Cauchy mutation. Next, the benchmark terrain model accurately models the 3D environment, and the global path planning problem is solved using a combination of I-AEFA and cubic spline interpolation. Then, a large number of virtual simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the algorithm's three improved mechanisms, various control point counts, as well as single and multi-robot configurations before migrating the algorithm to the graphical modeling and analysis software (GMAS) for hardware-in-the-loop simulation experiments. Finally, the experimental results are analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively using a variety of visualization techniques and two nonparametric test methods, demonstrating that the I-AEFA proposed in this paper has good optimization performance and is highly effective, reliable, and scalable for solving robot path planning problems.