Path Planning Techniques for Mobile Robots A Review

Mobile robots have become increasingly popular in recent years, offering a wide range of applications in areas such as industry, agriculture, search and rescue and much more. This has been achieved mainly as a result of extremely active research and development work on robotic and autonomous technology. We are still faced with many challenges however in order for a robot to navigate efficiently and reliably in an environment without any human assistance. The robot should be capable of extracting the necessary information from the environment and taking the necessary action required to plan a feasible path for collision free motion to reach its goal. In this paper, we review the most commonly used path planning methodologies that have been applied for mobile robot navigation in both static and dynamic environments. We look at both global and local path planning approaches as well as classical and heuristic based techniques.