Smooth Path Planning of a Mobile Robot Using Stochastic Particle Swarm Optimization

This paper proposes a new approach using improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) to optimize the path of a mobile robot through an environment containing static obstacles. Relative to many optimization methods that produce nonsmooth paths, the PSO method developed in this paper can generate smooth paths, which are more preferable for designing continuous control technologies to realize path following using mobile robots. To reduce computational cost of optimization, the stochastic PSO (S-PSO) with high exploration ability is developed, so that a swarm with small size can accomplish path planning. Simulation results validate the proposed algorithm in a mobile robot path planning