Analysis of Pathfinding Algorithms for Mobile Robots Movement

The article presents a study of the properties of breadth-first search (BFS), depth-first search (DFS), and wave propagation (WP) algorithms that can be used to improve robots’ pathfinding. DFS and BFS differ in how they traverse the graph: DFS goes deeper in levels first, then explores other options, and BFS goes wide, exploring the same level of nodes first. WP uses BFS’s traversal in the first part of its algorithm. The prepared test suite investigated the influence of factors such as the size of the space, the number of obstacles, and the distance between the start and end points on the algorithm's speed. The experimental comparison concluded that DFS is the fastest, but its paths are not the shortest and unpredictable. Graph traversal depends on implementation. BFS is slower but always finds the most optimal way. WP is the slowest but also provides the shortest path. Possible improvements using fuzzy logic are presented.