IOAS: A Discrete Path Planning Algorithm for Mobile Robot

For the path planning problem of mobile robots in static environment, there are some problems that the planned path is not optimized enough and it is difficult to solve the environment models with narrow channels or traps. To solve these problems, this paper proposes an Iterative Obstacle Avoidance Search (IOAS) algorithm, which can quickly plan the optimal path and can be applied to various environment models. Firstly, a path network is established by IOAS algorithm, and the nature that the path network must contain the shortest path is proved, and then the Dijkstra algorithm is used to plan the shortest path. In the process of establishing the path network, for reducing the number of the edges, the algorithm uses the positions of the start point and the target point of the mobile robot and the obstacles information to construct the path network, and uses a method to bypass the obstacle when the path collides with them. Experimental results show that by using the path network, the IOAS algorithm can solve the shortest path, and it takes less time to solve the shortest path than using the full path network on large scale problems. At the same time, the IOAS algorithm is better than two state-of-the-art algorithms in the literature on the solving quality.