A Hybrid Path Planning Technique for the Time-Efficient Navigation of Unmanned Vehicles in an Unconstrained Environment

Optimal path planning refers to choosing a collision-free, shortest, and smooth path, which is achieved by proposing a new technique, Optimized A* (OA*). The proposed OA* is the hybrid version of three techniques that are ABA* (Adaptive Bidirectional A*), VTM (Vector triangulation method), and PSF (Path smoothing filter which is the modification of Bezier curve technique). The conventional A* only deal with the heuristic values of concerned nodes, but the proposed ABA* algorithm also considers the occupied cells/ obstacles present near the starting and goal nodes in the grid cells to select the shortest path from start to destination. Due to the involvement of the occupied cells, the execution time, path curves, and the number of operations is primarily reduced because occupied nodes are considered as closed nodes, and its heuristic calculation is not considered in the conventional method. The trajectory generated by the proposed ABA* technique is also further made smoother by implementing a path smoothing filter that is the combination of VTM and modified Bezier curve technique based on selecting optimal control point for the collision free trajectory. While implementing the proposed OA* makes the path trajectory become smoother by reducing the number of sharp turns by 85.36% w.r.t traditional ACO, 73.91% w.r.t improved ACO, and 64.70% w.r.t hybrid solution of ACO+ A*. Due to the reduction in the number of sharp turns in the path trajectory, the acceleration of the mobile robot is increased by 52.96% w.r.t traditional ACO, 28.63% w.r.t improved ACO, and 19.96% w.r.t hybrid solution of ACO+ A*.