Wave Front Method Based Path Planning Algorithm for Mobile Robots

Path planning problem revolves around finding a path from start node to goal node without any collisions. This paper presents an improved version of Focused Wave Front Algorithm for mobile robot path planning in static 2D environment. Existing wave expansion algorithms either provide speed or optimality. We try to counter this problem by preventing the full expansion of the wave and expanding specific nodes such that optimality is retained. Our proposed algorithm 'Optimally Focused Wave Front algorithm' provides a very attractive package of speed and optimality. It allocates weight and cost to each node but it defines cost in a different fashion and employs diagonal distance instead of Euclidean distance. Finally, we compared our proposed algorithm with existing Wave Front Algorithms. We found that our proposed approach gave optimal results when compared with Focused Wave Front Algorithm and faster results when compared with Modified Wave Front Algorithm.