Document Type : Original Research Paper

Authors

• B. Mahdipour ¹
• S. H. Zahiri ²
• I. Behravan ³

¹ Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Birjand, Birjand, Iran.

² Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Birjand, Birjand, Iran.

³ Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Birjand, Birjand, Iran.

Abstract

Background and Objectives: Path planning is one of the most important topics related to the navigation of all kinds of moving vehicles such as airplanes, surface and subsurface vessels, cars, etc. Undoubtedly, in the process of making these tools more intelligent, detecting and crossing obstacles without encountering them by taking the shortest path is one of the most important goals of researchers. Significant success in this field can lead to significant progress in the use of these tools in a variety of applications such as industrial, military, transportation, commercial, etc. In this paper, a metaheuristic-based approach with the introduction of new fitness functions is presented for the problem of path planning for various types of surface and subsurface moving vehicles.
Methods: The proposed approach for path planning in this research is based on the metaheuristic methods, which makes use of a novel fitness function. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is the metaheuristic method leveraged in this research but other types of metaheuristic methods can also be used in the proposed architecture for path planning.
Results: The efficiency of the proposed method, is tested on two synthetic environments for finding the best path between the predefined origin and destination for both surface and subsurface unmanned intelligent vessels. In both cases, the proposed method was able to find the best path or the closest answer to it.
Conclusion: In this paper, an efficient method for the path planning problem is presented. The proposed method is designed using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). In the proposed method, several effective fitness function have been defined so that the best path or one of the closest answers can be obtained by utilized metaheuristic algorithm. The results of implementing the proposed method on real and simulated geographic data show its good performance. Also, the obtained quantitative results (time elapsed, success rate, path cost, standard deviation) have been compared with other similar methods. In all of these measurements, the proposed algorithm outperforms other methods or is comparable to them.

Keywords

• Particle swarm optimization (PSO)
• Path planning
• Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV)
• Unmanned surface vehicle (USV)

Main Subjects

• Swarm intelligence

Open Access

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Publisher

Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University