An improved A star algorithm for wheeled robots path planning with jump points search and pruning method

Abstract

Wheeled robots enjoy popularity in extensive areas such as food delivery and room disinfection. They can lower labor costs, protect human health from infection, and so on. Given the need to avoid obstacles, the path planning of robots is an elementary module. The A* algorithm has been widely used thus far, but it suffers much memory overhead and provides a suboptimal path. Therefore, we propose an improved A* algorithm with the jump point search method and pruning idea. Specifically, the jump point search method reduces the occupancy rate of the open list. The shorter length of the path can be achieved by pruning. Simulation experiments proved that the improvement was effective and practical.