Genetic path planning for mobile robots

Abstract

Optimal path planning is an important feature of autonomous mobile robot guidance and control during outdoor missions. Offline path planning of any manoeuvres in cluttered environments depends on pre-mission knowledge about topographical features of the landscape between the robot's start position and goal position. A topographical landscape consists of regions with different traversal costs, and it is not necessarily binary in nature. For certain extraterrestrial or cross-country missions, where a lack of vehicular resources has to be handled, there is a strong need to calculate an optimal path according to a given optimization criterion. The paper presents a genetic approach to the problem. Evolutionary computation is used to carry out path optimization.