Obstacle avoidance path planning for mobile robot based on Ant-Q reinforcement learning algorithm

Path planning is an important task in mobile robot control. When the robot must move rapidly from any arbitrary start positions to any target positions in environment, a proper path must avoid both static obstacles and moving obstacles of arbitrary shape. In this paper, an obstacle avoidance path planning approach for mobile robots is proposed by using Ant-Q algorithm. Ant-Q is an algorithm in the family of ant colony based methods that are distributed algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems based on the metaphor of ant colonies. In the simulation, we experimentally investigate the sensitivity of the Ant-Q algorithm to its three methods of delayed reinforcement updating and we compare it with the results obtained by other heuristic approaches based on genetic algorithm or traditional ant colony system. At last, we will show very good results obtained by applying Ant-Q to bigger problem: Ant-Q find very good path at higher convergence rate.