An Improved Minimum-Cost Pathfinding Algorithm for Mobile Robot Navigation

—In this paper, we present an effective pathfinding algorithm for mobile robot navigation. The algorithm stem is from the A* algorithm that can perform minimum-cost path navigation with the added obstacles avoidance capability. A set of passive RFID tags placed on the Cartesian grids where used for location identification. During navigation, the RFID reader attached on the mobile robot receives its nearby RFID tags' ID to determine the robot's current position, and use it to formulate the minimum-cost path that goes from the present location to the target point. The devised path is a set of connected RFID tags computed by the A* algorithm. The proposed improved A* algorithm explored a heuristic search of the minimal cost navigation path that taking into consideration of the presence of obstacles so that the devised optimal path would not collide with the obstacles. Passive RFID tags have the advantages of low cost, providing unequivocal coordinate information, fast computation and easy deployment.

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