Fuzzy Logic-Ant Colony Optimization for Explorer-Follower Robot with Global Optimal Path Planning

Path planning is an essential task for the mobile robot navigation. However, such a task is difficult to solve, due to the optimal path needs to be rerouted in real-time when a new obstacle appears. It produces a sub-optimal path and the robot can be trapped in local minima. To overcome the problem the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is combined with Fuzzy Logic Approach to make a globally optimal path. The Fuzzy-ACO algorithm is selected because the fuzzy logic has good performance in imprecision and uncertain environment and the ACO produce simple optimization with an ability to find the globally optimal path. Moreover, many optimization algorithms addressed only at the simulation level. In this research, the real experiment is conducted with the low-cost Explorer-Follower robot. The results show that the proposed algorithm, enables them to successfully identify the shortest path without collision and stack in “local minima”.