Real-time heuristic search based minimum energy path planning of wheeled mobile robot

Abstract

Wheeled mobile robots carry a limited amount of on-board power supply. Therefore, they should reach their destination before they lose all of their energy. This paper presents a real-time heuristic search based optimal on-line path planning technique for wheeled mobile robots so that it consumes minimum energy during its operation in known environment. The Real-Time A* (RTA*) algorithm has been employed for this purpose for its elegance and capability to perform search and optimization on-line. An energy model of the wheeled mobile robot has been considered to formulate the minimum energy cost function. The proposed method has been implemented to make the wheeled mobile robots navigate through static obstacles and to generate a minimum energy consumption path by restricting the motion of the robot in an optimal direction. Finally, the computational complexity of the proposed method has been calculated to access its utility in real-time applications and effectiveness of the algorithm has been verified in simulation studies.