A Variable-step Two Synchronous Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for mobile Robot Path Planning

In this paper, an improved Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is proposed to solve the problem of mobile robot's path planning. At first, the synchronization mechanism is proposed to accelerate the slow convergence rate of the standard artificial colony algorithm. Second, because the standard artificial bee colony algorithm is easy to fall into the local optimal solution. An adaptive variable step size search strategy is designed to adjust the search step to jump out of the local optimal solution in each search process. In the simulation experiments, the improved bee colony algorithm is analyzed and compared with the standard artificial bee colony algorithm in different map scale and obstacle rate. From the experimental results, it can be drawn that the algorithm of this paper can effectively accelerate the convergence speed, smooth the search path and reduce the path length.