Autonomous path planning with obstacle avoidance for smart assistive systems

Abstract

Given the increased interest in smart assistive technologies and autonomous robot vehicles, path planning has emerged as one of the most researched and challenging topics in navigation. Moving to partially known or unknown environment, an assistive navigation system should be able to extract spatiotemporal information and dynamically identify objects and adjust the route. Current approaches typically rely on external services to perform high demanding computations and employ a plethora of overlapping sensors to accurately scan the surrounding environment. This increases their energy demands, size and weight, while incommodes their use in real time applications making their application to wearable assistive systems, such as smart glasses, a challenge. Aiming to provide a comfortable and computationally efficient wearable solution that can be used by human or robotic assistive systems, in this study we propose a novel two-level hierarchical architecture combining global and local path planning. The macroscale navigation involves the construction of the initial global path while the microscale navigation includes the local path planning with obstacle detection and avoidance. The methodology consists of: (i) a novel chaotic ant colony optimization algorithm with fuzzy logic (CACOF) for path construction; (ii) powerful and light weight deep convolutional neural networks for obstacle detection; and (iii) a Bug-like algorithm enhanced with fuzzy rules for obstacle avoidance in case of static objects. A vast experimental evaluation was conducted to test the proposed methodologies in a simulation environment based on the topology of real area. The results proved the computational efficiency and ability of the proposed path planning algorithms to address effectively multi-objective global and path planning problems which make them suitable for real time applications.