Intelligent path planning for automated guided vehicles system based on topological map

Path planning is one of the key aspects of designing and implementing intelligent robots. This paper presents a novel path planning approach for automated guided vehicles (AGVs). In the proposed approach, the overall AGV control system is introduced and the environment is modeled as topological map. An improved version of classical Dijkstra´s algorithm is developed aiming to find the globally optimal path which is a set of nodes of the warehouse topological map. Also, the local path planning is addressed by using a heuristics-based algorithm-A* algorithm which searches for the local minimum path between every two neighbor nodes of the global path. To assess the performance of the suggested algorithms, a number of simulation experiments are carried out for a range of scenarios. The result demonstrates the effectiveness of the algorithmic design and the AGV path planning solution.