Integration of the artificial potential field approach with simulated annealing for robot path planning

An integrated approach to local as well as global path planning of the robot in stationary environments is proposed. To provide effectiveness, the path planning is based on the artificial potential field method and to ensure robustness, the susceptibility to local minima is reduced by using some heuristic strategies. The simulated annealing technique is applied when trapped in local minima. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms for local and global path planning is verified by a series of simulations. The performance of simulated annealing is evaluated by examining the effects of changing the various annealing parameters. The choices that improve simulated annealing performance are described