Path Planning Algorithm Based on Improved A*

To address the issue that the traditional A* algorithm has a long search time and the path obtained is not always the shortest path, this paper proposes an improved A* method that removes redundant child nodes based on the positional relationship between the current node and the target point and incorporates a bi-directional search to search for paths from both the starting and end points at the same time. According to the results of simulation experiments on raster maps of various sizes and complexity, the improved A* algorithm proposed in this paper significantly improves search speed, reduces search time by an order of magnitude, and shortens path length in some specific environments compared to the traditional A* algorithm.