A Novel Goal oriented Sampling Method for Improving the Convergence Rate of Sampling based Path Planning for Autonomous Mobile Robot Navigation

Abstract

Autonomous Mobile Robots' performance relies on intelligent motion planning algorithms. In autonomous mobile robots, sampling-based path-planning algorithms are widely used. One of the efficient sampling-based path planning algorithms is the Rapidly Exploring Random Tree (RRT). However, the solution provided by RRT is suboptimal. An RRT extension known as RRT* is optimal, but it takes time to converge. To improve the RRT* slow convergence problem, a goal-oriented sampling-based RRT* algorithm known as GS-RRT* is proposed in this paper. The focus of the proposed research work is to reduce unwanted sample exploration and solve the slow convergence problem of RRT* by taking more samples in the vicinity of the goal region. The proposed research work is validated in three different environments with a map size of 384*384 and compared to the existing algorithms: RRT, Goal-directed RRT(G-RRT), RRT*, and Informed-RRT*. The proposed research work is compared with existing algorithms using four metrics: path length, time to find the solution, the number of nodes visited, and the convergence rate. The validation is done in the Gazebo Simulation and on a TurtleBot3 mobile robot using the Robotics Operating System (ROS). The numerical findings show that the proposed research work improves the convergence rate by an average of 33% over RRT* and 27% over Informed RRT*, and the node exploration is 26% better than RRT* and 20% better than Informed RRT*.