Optimizing Navigation in Mobile Robots: Modified Particle Swarm Optimization and Genetic Algorithms for Effective Path Planning

Mobile robots are increasingly integral to diverse applications, with path-planning algorithms being essential for efficient and secure mobile robot navigation. Mobile robot path planning is defined as the design of the least time-consuming, shortest-distance, and most collision-free path from the starting point to the endpoint for the mobile robot’s autonomous movement. This study investigates and assesses two widely used algorithms in artificial intelligence (AI)—Improved Particle Swarm Optimization (IPSO) and Improved Genetic Algorithm (IGA)—for path planning of mobile robot navigation problems. In this work Manhattan movements are proposed as a distance formula to modify both algorithms in the path planning of the mobile robot navigation problem. Unlike the traditional GA and PSO, which can use horizontal search, the proposed algorithm relies on vertical search, which gives us an advantage. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of these modified algorithms in barrier detection and obstacle avoidance. Six different experiments were run using both improved algorithms to show their ability to achieve their goal and avoid obstacles in various scenarios with different complexities. Across various scenarios, the tested AI algorithms performed effectively, regardless of the map scale and complexity. This paper proposes a complete comparison between the two improved algorithms in different scenarios. The results show that the algorithms’ performance is influenced more by the density of walls and obstacles than by the size or complexity of the map.