Fast and Optimal Path Planning Algorithm (FAOPPA) for a Mobile Robot

Motion planning problem though widely studied in robotics is a difficult problem. It finds a feasible path from an initial position to a final position in an environment with obstacles. Recent researches do not just aim to find feasible paths but to find paths that are optimal in respect to time, distance and safety of the robots. Optimization based techniques have been proposed to solve this problem but some of them used techniques that may converge to local minimum and they seldom consider the speed of the technique. Hence this paper presents a fast and global motion planning algorithm for a mobile robot in a known environment with static obstacles. It uses particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique for convergence to global minimum and a customized algorithm which generates the coordinates of the search space. The coordinate values when generated by the customized algorithm are passed to the PSO algorithm which uses them to determine the shortest path between the two given end positions. We perform our experiments using four different environments with population sizes 100, 50, 20 and 10 in a 10 × 10 grid and our results are favorable.