Integrated simulation environment development for mobile robot path planning

In the field of mobile robotics, much research has been devoted to creating algorithms that find optimized paths through a complex obstacle field. Paths can be considered "optimized" based on many different criteria, and therefore there is a wide variety of effective path planning algorithms. The overall effectiveness of an algorithm can be evaluated by comparing the paths it generates to paths generated by other algorithms. Such a task is most easily accomplished through computer simulations. This paper will discuss a simulation program created for comparing path planning algorithms. Attention will be placed on the realization of the different path planning algorithms used in the simulator program.