ACO-GA-Based Optimization to Enhance Global Path Planning for Autonomous Navigation in Grid Environments

Exploring path planning techniques for autonomous vehicles to find the safest and quickest routes is fascinating. Among these techniques, generating grid-based maps is notable for simplifying the path planning process, especially in complex environments. This study introduces a novel optimization approach, the modified ant colony optimization and genetic algorithm (MACOGA), which is tailored for path planning in grid environments. MACOGA combines ant colony optimization (ACO) with genetic algorithm (GA) to efficiently navigate grid spaces. First, ACO identifies potential routes within a grid map, and GA optimizes them to find the optimal route. A key feature of MACOGA is its probabilistic prediction mechanism, which improves node selection by integrating the heuristic factors and probabilistic calculations of feasible potential paths, which significantly increases the likelihood of generating feasible initial paths and attains higher success rates in various environmental tests. The enhanced GA in the MACOGA incorporates ACO’s pheromones and heuristic factors, and introduces adaptive probability crossover and mutation operations. Additionally, a path reconnection operation ensures favorable length and smoothness. To evaluate MACOGA’s effectiveness, six planar models of varying sizes and complexities were studied. Results show MACOGA’s superiority in path length and execution time, achieving the shortest path and planning time in several environments. The shortest path can be optimized to yield an improvement of up to 6%. Regarding runtime, even in the complex scenarios, it executes in just 0.3 seconds, outperforming other comparative algorithms. Furthermore, the success rate can reach 100% in relatively complex environments.