Path finding simulator for mobile robot navigation

This work considers the whole process of making a path finding simulator for Pioneer 3DX mobile robot. This simulator needs to be provided implementation of various optimal path finding algorithms and make their comparisons. For this purpose a software solution (GUI in Matlab) has been designed and tested. The simulator allows selecting mazes, different starting and finishing nodes and algorithms. Five different algorithms were used to determine the shortest path between nodes for a mobile robot within various mazes: Breadth-first search, Depth-first search, Bellman-Ford algorithm, Dijkstra´s algorithm and A* algorithm. The main objective of this paper was to obtain fully and precise information on routing and finding the shortest path between two nodes within a maze for the mobile robot. Validity and effectiveness of the used algorithms were verified through both simulations and experiments.