A Hybrid Path planning approach combining Artificial Potential Field and Particle Swarm Optimization for Mobile Robot

In this paper, a hybrid approach for path planning of mobile robot is presented, combining the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique and the Artificial Potential Field method (APF). The hybrid approach is used to locate a viable route in an environment with many static obstacles. The path planning of mobile robot using only PSO is computationally intensive. And path planning using APF alone has few inherent problems like getting stuck in the local minima and goal non-reachable with obstacles nearby(GNRON). Therefore the proposed approach overcomes the drawbacks of the APF method and gives the waypoints in less time as compared to path planning done using PSO. This hybrid approach is tested for four different scenarios and results show that this approach solves the drawbacks of APF method.