An ant optimization method for path planning on a cuboid

Path planning on the surfaces of a cuboid is widespread in engineering applications. It has been employed in many areas, such as network routing, the emergency rescuing upon high-rise buildings, wall-climbing robots picking and placing on a box-shaped objects, a large scale cleaning on roofs or walls, as well as painting for furniture. There are three types, including 21 cases, of the distances between city pairs on the surface of a cuboid. Thus, the calculating the minimum distance methods are introduced in this paper by expanding and flipping the alternative faces of the cuboid. And then a new ant colony optimization-based method to solve the travelling salesman problems on the surfaces of a cuboid is presented and is tested on several TSPLIB benchmarks and some random point sets. Experimental results show that the proposed method is feasible and effective.