Application of Particle Swarm Optimization to Robot Path Planning Problem

A robot path planning problem is to produce a path that connects a start configuration and a goal configuration while avoiding collision with obstacles. To obtain a path for robots with high degree of freedom of motion such as an articulated robot efficiently, sampling-based algorithms such as probabilistic roadmap (PRM) and rapidly-exploring random tree (RRT) were proposed. In this paper, a new robot path planning method based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), which is one of heuristic optimization methods, is proposed in order to improve efficiency of path planning for a wider range of problems. In the proposed method, a group of particles fly through a configuration space while avoiding collision with obstacles and a collection of their trajectories is regarded as a roadmap. A velocity of each particle is updated for every time step based on the update equation of PSO. After explaining the details of the proposed method, this paper shows the comparisons of efficiency between the proposed method and RRT for 2D maze problems and then shows application of the proposed method to path planning for a 6 degree of freedom articulated robot.