Foraging Ant Motion Planning for Articulated Robots

This paper describes a new and simple motion planning method to find a path between start and goal configurations for an articulated robot using the foraging ant strategy, F-Ant. Observation by an ant looking from its current position to the target location will help to reduce the steps taken to get to the goal. While most of the previously developed algorithms such as the SBL-PRM planner depends on the size of the previously generated sampled set of configurations, the foraging ant motion planner samples new configurations in the neighbourhood of the last point. This will only generate the necessary configurations for building the path. The new planner has been tested and it managed to reduce the number of configurations generated to build a successful path