Path Planning of a Mobile Robot in Grid Space using Boundary Node Method

This paper presents a new off-line path planning method for a mobile robot to generate an optimal or near-optimal collision-free path between starting and goal points in a given working environment with obstacles. In a new method called Boundary Node Method, the robot is simulated by nine-node quadrilateral element, the centroid node represents the robot’s location and it moves with eight-boundary nodes in the working environments. A robot is exploring an environment with the help of the node’s potential value at each location, where the potential value is calculated based on the proposed potential function. The proposed method is capable of generating the initial collision-free path for a mobile robot safely and quickly. Subsequently, an additional new method called Path Enhancement Method is used to find shortest path by reducing the overall initial path length. The simulation results indicate that this method can successfully generate an optimal or near-optimal collision-free path efficiently.