Optimal Motion Planning Approach for Mobile Robot Navigation Problem

In this study, modified genetic algorithm (MGA) and A* search method (A*) is proposed for optimal motion planning of mobile robots. MGA utilizes the classical search and modified A* to establish a sub-optimal collision-free path as initial solution in simple and complex static environment. The enhancements for the proposed approach are presented in initialization stage and enhanced operators. Five objective functions are used to minimize traveling length, time, smoothness, security and trajectory and to reduce the energy consumption for mobile robots by using Cubic Spline interpolation curve fitting for optimal planned path. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the proposed approach performance by taking into consideration the effect of changing the number of iteration (it) and the size of population (pop) on its performance index. The simulation results show the effectiveness of proposed approach in governing the robot’s movements successfully from start to goal point after avoiding all obstacles its way in all tested environment. In addition, the results indicate that the proposed approach can find the optimal solution efficiently in a single run. This approach has been carried out by GUI using a popular engineering programming language, MATLAB.