A Straight Moving Path Planner for Mobile Robots in Static Environments Using Cellular Automata

Planning a collision free path for a robot in an environment with lots of obstacles is one of the most important issues in robotics. Path planning using robots draws the most attention when the planning environment is dangerous or inaccessible for human. In this paper a cellular automata based algorithm called SMPP (Straight Moving Path Planner) is presented for robot path planning problem. The advantage of this approach is that it prefers straight moves rather than zigzag steps. It is shown that how SMPP can help us finding a reasonable optimum path from the start point of the robot to the goal position in presence of obstacles. The proposed algorithm is then compared to the previous works done on the basis of cellular automata and the results are presented to validate the approach.