Improved Heterogeneous-Ants-Based Path Planner using RRT
Path planning is an important problem to solve in robotics and there has been many related studies so far. In the previous research, we proposed the Heterogeneous-Ants-Based Path Planner (HAB-PP) for the global path planning of mobile robots. The conventional path planners using grid map had discrete state transitions that constrain the only movement of an agent to multiples of 45 degrees. The HAB-PP provided the smoother path using the heterogeneous ants unlike the conventional path planners based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm. The planner, however, has the problem that the optimization of the path once found is fast but it takes a lot of time to find the first path to the goal point. Also, the HAB-PP often falls into a local optimum solution. To solve these problems, this paper proposes an improved ant-inspired path planner using the Rapidly-exploring Random Tree-star (RRT*). The key ideas are to use RRT* as the characteristic of another heterogeneous ant and to share the information for the found path through the pheromone field. The comparative simulations with several scenarios verify the performance of the improved HAB-PP.