Safety considerations in the optimisation of paths for mobile robots using genetic algorithms

This paper presents a genetic-based approach to mobile robot motion planning with a distance-safety criterion. A wave front method is used to build the numerical potential fields for both the goal points and the obstacles by representing the workspace as a grid. A computationally efficient genetic algorithm is proposed to search for near optimal paths, where a combined global and local optimisation approach is employed to speed up the search process while considering the imposed requirements. Various simulation results show the effectiveness of the presented algorithm, including a comparison with the A* method.