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Solving the multi-objective path planning problem in mobile robotics with a firefly-based approach

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Abstract

Currently, autonomous robotics is one of the most interesting and researched areas of technology. At the beginning, robots only worked in the industrial sector but, gradually, they started to be introduced into other sectors such as medicine or social environments becoming part of society. In mobile robots, the path planning (PP) problem is one of the most researched topics. Taking into account that the PP problem is an NP-hard problem, multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) are good candidates to solve this problem. In this work, a new multi-objective approach based on the flashing behavior of fireflies in nature, the multi-objective firefly algorithm (MO-FA), is proposed to solve the PP problem. This proposed algorithm is a swarm intelligence algorithm. The proposed MO-FA handles three different objectives to obtain accurate and efficient solutions. These objectives are the following: the path safety, the path length, and the path smoothness (related to the energy consumption). Furthermore, and to test the proposed MOEA, we have used eight realistic scenarios for the path’s calculation. On the other hand, we also compare our proposal with other approaches of the state of the art, showing the advantages of MO-FA. In particular, to evaluate the obtained results we applied specific quality metrics. Moreover, to demonstrate the statistical evidence of the obtained results, we also performed a statistical analysis. Finally, the study shows that the proposed MO-FA is a good alternative to solve the PP problem.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially funded by the Projects of Excellence from the Junta de Andalucía (Spain) ROMOCOG I and ROMOCOG II (P09-TEP-4479 and P10-TEP-6412). The work was also partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the ERDF (European Regional Development Fund), under the contract TIN2012-30685 (BIO project).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Technologies of Computers and Communications, University of Extremadura, Polytechnic School, Cáceres, Spain

    Alejandro Hidalgo-Paniagua & Miguel A. Vega-Rodríguez

  2. Department of Systems Engineering and Automation, University of Sevilla, Higher Technical School of Engineering, Sevilla, Spain

    Joaquín Ferruz

  3. Department of Information Technology, University of Huelva, Higher Technical School of Engineering, Huelva, Spain

    Nieves Pavón

Authors
  1. Alejandro Hidalgo-Paniagua
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  2. Miguel A. Vega-Rodríguez
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  3. Joaquín Ferruz
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  4. Nieves Pavón
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Correspondence to Alejandro Hidalgo-Paniagua.

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Communicated by V. Loia.

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Hidalgo-Paniagua, A., Vega-Rodríguez, M.A., Ferruz, J. et al. Solving the multi-objective path planning problem in mobile robotics with a firefly-based approach. Soft Comput 21, 949–964 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-015-1825-z

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