A Composite Metric Routing Approach for Energy-Efficient Shortest Path Planning on Natural Terrains

Applied Sciences

Ali El-Moursy¹  Mohamed Saad¹  Saeed Abdallah²  Ahmed I. Salameh²  Chi-Tsun Cheng³ 

[1] Department of Computer Engineering, University of Sharjah, Sharjah 009716, United Arab Emirates;Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Sharjah, Sharjah 009716, United Arab Emirates;Department of Manufacturing, Materials and Mechatronics, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia;

关键词: unmanned ground vehicle (UGV);    path planning;    energy efficient;    terramechanics;    dijkstra;    ant colony optimization;   

DOI  :  10.3390/app11156939

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

This paper explores the problem of energy-efficient shortest path planning on off-road, natural, real-life terrain for unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). We present a greedy path planning algorithm based on a composite metric routing approach that combines the energy consumption and distance of the path. In our work, we consider the Terramechanics between the UGV and the terrain soil to account for the wheel sinkage effect, in addition to the terrain slope and soil deformation limitations in the development of the path planning algorithm. As benchmarks for comparison, we use a recent energy-cost minimization approach, in addition to an ant colony optimization (ACO) implementation. Our results indicate that the proposed composite metric routing approach outperforms the state-of-the-art energy-cost minimization method in terms of the resulting path distance, with a negligible increase in energy consumption. Moreover, our results indicate also that the proposed greedy algorithm strongly outperforms the ACO implementation in terms of the quality of the paths obtained and the algorithm running time. In fact, the running time of our proposed algorithm indicates its suitability for large natural terrain graphs with thousands of nodes and tens of thousands of links.

【 授权许可】

Unknown