Smooth and Efficient Path Planning for Car-like Mobile Robot Using Improved Ant Colony Optimization in Narrow and Large-Size Scenes

Car-like mobile robots (CLMRs) are extensively utilized in various intricate scenarios owing to their exceptional maneuverability, stability, and adaptability, in which path planning is an important technical basis for their autonomous navigation. However, path planning methods are prone to inefficiently generate unsmooth paths in narrow and large-size scenes, especially considering the chassis model complexity of CLMRs with suspension. To this end, instead of traditional path planning based on an integer order model, this paper proposes fractional-order enhanced path planning using an improved Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) for CLMRs with suspension, which can obtain smooth and efficient paths in narrow and large-size scenes. On one hand, to improve the accuracy of the kinematic model construction of CLMRs with suspension, an accurate fractional-order-based kinematic modelling method is proposed, which considers the dynamic adjustment of the angle constraints. On the other hand, an improved ACO-based path planning method using fractional-order models is introduced by adopting a global multifactorial heuristic function with dynamic angle constraints, adaptive pheromone adjustment, and fractional-order state-transfer models, which avoids easily falling into a local optimum and unsmooth problem in a narrow space while increasing the search speed and success rate in large-scale scenes. Finally, the proposed method's effectiveness is validated in both large-scale and narrow scenes, confirming its capability to handle various challenging scenarios.