Evolutionary Planner/Navigator: operator performance and self-tuning

Based on evolutionary computation concepts, the Evolutionary Planner/Navigator (EP/N) represents a new approach to path planning and navigation. Since its first version, the development of the EP/N system has been an ever living “evolution” process itself: much new development and further research has been carried out to fulfil the EP/N promise of being able to (1) accommodate different optimization criteria; (2) achieve both near-optimality of paths and high planning efficiency, (3) be flexible to changes, and (4) be robust to uncertainties. A more important promise of the EP/N is its ability for performance self-tuning to adapt to different task environments, mostly through the adaptiveness of its genetic operations. The paper introduces a methodology to measure the overall performance of the EP/N operators and demonstrates how such a measure, called “performance index” for each operator, can be used to make the EP/N adaptive