Ant Colony Optimization with Improved Potential Field Heuristic for Robot Path Planning

An ant colony optimization with improved potential field algorithm for robot path planning is proposed in this paper. Potential field resultant is used as a kind of heuristic for finding a path. The improved algorithm makes the advantages of potential field and ant colony algorithm in different stages of program operation and shows good features in searching for the optimal path. The length optimal or suboptimal path can always be found in different environments. Simulation results showed that the improved algorithm has higher convergence speed compared to the general ant colony algorithm, it also has a pretty good global searching ability.