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Optimal Robot Path Selection Using Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchical Process
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1  Faculty of Engineering, Kitami Institute of Technology, Kitami, Hokkaido, Japan

Abstract:

Robot path planning is an integral process of mobile robots. A service mobile robots needs to plan a path from its current location to the goal (service) location. Many algorithms like A-star, D-star, Probabilistic Roadmap, Rapidly-exploring random tree, Dijkstra, and other planners have successfully been used for path planning. Most of these planners generate a shortest path from the start location to the goal location. However, the shortest path is not necessarily the best (for ex. safest) path. Apart from the distance between the start and goal locations, a robot must consider several other factors like the bumpiness, steepness, and crowd on the path. Depending on the sensors used by the robots, other factors like the brightness of the path, for ex. in case of vision sensors, must also be considered. There could be different paths between the same start and goal locations, and the robot must select the optimal path from many paths. The factors which influence the generation of such paths can be dynamic. Moreover, each factor has a varying degree of influence on the selection of path by the robot which also varies from robot to robot. In such situations, selecting a particular path based on a rigorous mathematical analysis which validates the particular selection becomes necessary. In this paper we propose to use Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchical Process (Fuzzy-AHP) to make the optimal selection of the path considering multiple factors. We propose two navigational approaches, namely, defensive and offensive approaches which can be taken by mobile robots to complete a task. We test the results of the proposed method and show comparison with other approaches in simulations.

Keywords: Robot Path Planning, Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchical Process, Robots in Sensor Networks
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