Wall-climbing Robot Path Planning for Cylindrical Storage Tank Inspection Based on Modified A-star Algorithm

Wall-climbing robots have been widely developed in the application of storage tank inspection. One of the significant issues in robot tank inspection is how to determine an optimal path for the robot from an initial position to the destination. A-star algorithm is a first search algorithm commonly used in robotics path planning, whereas it may suffer from some drawbacks, for example, there are some redundant points could be removed from the generated path and some sharp turns need to be smoother for the robot to track with. As a result, a modified A-star algorithm is proposed in this paper to optimize the generated path. The simulation results show that the number of way points is decreased and the sharp turns in the path are removed. Therefore, this modified algorithm can provide a more efficient path planning with smoother curves and shorter operation time compared with normal method, without losing the optimization.