Path Planning Based on an Improved Ant Colony Algorithm

Abstract

The classical ant colony algorithm has the disadvantages of initial search blindness, slow convergence speed and easy to fall into local optimum when applied to mobile robot path planning. This paper presents an improved ant colony algorithm in order to solve these disadvantages. First, the algorithm use A* search algorithm for initial search to generate uneven initial pheromone distribution to solve the initial search blindness problem. At the same time, the algorithm also limits the pheromone concentration to avoid local optimum. Then, the algorithm optimizes the transfer probability and adopts the pheromone update rule of "incentive and suppression strategy" to accelerate the convergence speed. Finally, the algorithm builds an adaptive model of pheromone coefficient to make the pheromone coefficient adjustment self-adaptive to avoid falling into a local minimum. The results proved that the proposed algorithm is practical and effective.