A comparative study of A-star algorithms for search and rescue in perfect maze

Robots can be widely used to fulfill the task of search and rescue trapped persons in some dangerous situations, which can be abstracted as a maze. Three A-star algorithms are studied in this paper to compare the maze searching capacity and efficiency of their different heuristic functions, and the depth-first search algorithm, which has no heuristic information, is also adopted as a benchmark to judge the usefulness of the 3 heuristic functions of A-star algorithms. Experiments validated the usefulness of heuristic function with the results that the A-star algorithms outperform the depth-first search algorithm in most cases, and the A-star algorithm with the Euclidean distance from the father point of current point to the target point included in the heuristic function shows the best performance.