Implementation of robotic path planning using Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm

Mobile robot path planning is critical in the present day of automation. Several situations may occur for humans, like the environment may be dirty, hazardous, might cause death, or injury as in case of mining, detecting leakage in pipe, cleaning of pipe etc. where robots can be successfully employed. The idea of this paper is to develop a mobile robot that finds the shortest route from source to destination by using Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm with a single robot. The hardware used is iRobot Create interfaced to NXP LPC1768 Cortex M3 controller. The same is simulated using MATLAB. The output of the hardware is also made visible in Teraterm. It is observed that the mobile robot is enhanced with considerable skills to trace a path of optimum distance from source to destination without any collision in most of the situations, barring a few.