Effectiveness of Robot Motion Block on A-Star Algorithm for Robotic Path Planning

Abstract

Efficient path planning and minimization of path movement costs for collision-free faster robot movement are very important in the field of robot automation. Several path planning algorithms have been explored to fulfill these requirements. Among them, the A-star (A*) algorithm performs better than others because of its heuristic search guidance. However, the performance, effectiveness, and searching time complexity of this algorithm mostly depends on the robot motion block to search for the goal by avoiding obstacles. With this challenge kept in mind, this paper proposes an efficient robot motion block with different block sizes for the A* path planning algorithm. The proposed approach reduces robots’ path cost and time complexity to find the goal position as well as avoid obstacles. In this proposed approach, grid-based maps are used where the robot’s next move is decided by searching eight directions among the surrounding grid points. However, the proposed robot motion blocks size has a significant effect on path cost and time complexity of the A* path planning algorithm. For the experiment and to validate the efficiency of the proposed approach, an online benchmarked dataset is used. The proposed approach is applied on thousands of different grid maps with various obstacles, starting, and goal positions. The obtained results from the experiment show that the presented robot motion blocks reduce the robot’s pathfinding time complexity and number of search nodes by maintaining a minimum path cost towards the goal position.