An ACO-based off-line path planner for nonholonomic mobile robots

The path planning is an important issue as it allows a robot to get from a point to another. Such a path between two points has to be optimized based on user defined requirements and environmental conditions. Most of the existing solutions to path planning problem assume robots to be holonomic. However, ordinary mobile robots are kinematically constrained in practice. A novel solution has been proposed for the path planning problem based on existing ant colony optimization methods which can be realized with practical mobile robots with the aforementioned constraints. Simulation results show the applicability of the proposed path planner to the nonholonomic mobile robots. Performance of the proposed algorithm has been compared with its preceding version. The performance of the proposed path planner may be further improved by fine-tuning its parameters.