An improved target-oriented path planning algorithm for wheeled mobile robots

Abstract

This paper proposes a target posture-oriented path planning method, where an improved A* algorithm and an optimized dynamic windows approach (DWA) are used at the global and local planning aspects, respectively. The method enables wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) to plan an optimal path under different posture situations which can shorten the time of achieving navigation task in certain scene. On the hand of global path planning, target posture and orientation information are added into A* algorithm to obtain appropriate path. At the level of local path planning, based on DWA, evaluation functions are optimized to make the robot movement adapting to curve global path and dynamic obstacle. By introducing rotation index to evaluate experiment results, the tests verify that WMRs can reasonably plan more efficient path compared with traditional path planning method, by satisfying various posture demand with the aid of the proposed target posture-oriented A* algorithm, and quickly avoid dynamic obstacles via the optimized DWA. Therefore, the proposed algorithm can be effectively applied to WMRs to execute various target posture demands navigation tasks.