SENSOR BASED PATH PLANNING OF MINI-ROBOT "KHEPERA" USING PHYSICAL A* (PHA*) ALGORITHM

This paper is concerned with the issue of enabling robots (mechanical devices equipped with actuators and sensors under the control of a computing system) to decide their own motion and to find the shortest path between two points in the unknown environments using the Physical A* algorithm (PHA*). Due to the physical nature of the problem, the complexity of the PHA* algorithm is measured by the traveling effort of the moving robot and not by the number of generated nodes. PHA* is presented as a two-level algorithm, such that itʹs high level, A*, chooses the next node to be expanded and its low level directs the robot to that node in order to explore it. We then applied this algorithm in the control protocol of mini robot called "Khepera" developed to study robotics technology for different applications. The results show the ability of the algorithm to let "khepera" maneuver successfully among obstacles founded in its environment without colliding them and to compute the shortest path to the goal configuration. Thus, it is recommended to apply PHA* algorithm on a group of robots to help them moving from one place to another to carry out some complex tasks. This study has been concluded with the hardware implementation of the mentioned algorithm and demonstration of the implemented systems.