Date of Award

2013

Degree Type

Thesis

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Simon, Dan

Subject Headings

Robots -- Motion, Mobile robots, Biogeography -- Mathematical models, Mathematical optimization, Probabilistic roadmap methods Biogeography-based optimization PRM BBO Path planning Mobile robots

Abstract

Probabilistic roadmap methods (PRM) have been a well-known solution for solving motion planning problems where we have a fixed set of start and goal configurations in a workspace. We define a configuration space with static obstacles. We implement PRM to find a feasible path between start and goal for car-like robots. We further extend the concept of path planning by incorporating evolutionary optimization algorithms to tune the PRM parameters. The theory is demonstrated with simulations and experiments. Our results show that there is a significant improvement in the performance metrics of PRM after optimizing the PRM parameters using biogeography-based optimization, which is an evolutionary optimization algorithm. The performance metrics (namely path length, number of hops, number of loops and fail-rate) show 34.91 , 23.18 , 52.21 and 21.21 improvement after using optimized PRM parameters. We also experimentally demonstrate the application of path planning using PRM to mobile car-like robots

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