Robot Path Planning Using an Improved Ant Colony System Based on Key Nodes

Aiming at the problems of low search efficiency and slow convergence speed of basic ant colony system algorithm, an improved ant colony path planning method based on key nodes is proposed. Firstly, the concept of key nodes is defined and a search strategy for key nodes is designed to improve the search efficiency by implementing multi-step search. Secondly, an im-proved heuristic function model is developed inspired by the cost calculation method in A* algorithm, which can improve the guidance of the heuristic in-formation. To further utilize the information carried by the key notes, the key nodes are classified into several groups according to the search direction to improve the search efficiency. Finally, simulation experiments are carried out in different grid environments. The results show that the pro-posed algorithm can effectively improve the search efficiency of ant colony algorithm, and it is an effective way to solve the robot path planning problems.