An Improved Path Planning Method Based on Artificial Potential Field for a Mobile Robot

To solve the problem of local minima and unreachable destination of the traditional artificial potential field method in mobile robot path planning, chaos optimization is introduced to improve the artificial potential field method. The potential field function was adopted as a target function of chaos optimization, and a kind of “two-stage” chaos optimization was used. The corresponding movement step and direction of the robot were achieved by chaos search. Comparison of the improved method proposed in this paper and the traditional artificial potential field method is performed by simulation. The simulation results show that the improved method gets rid of the drawbacks, such as local minima and unreachable goal. Furthermore, the improved method is also verified by building up a physical platform based on “Future Star” robot. The success of the physical experiment indicates that the improved algorithm is feasible and efficient for mobile robot path planning.