Off-road Path Planning Based on Improved Ant Colony Algorithm

Optimal vehicle off-road path planning problem must consider surface physical properties of terrain and soil. In this paper, we firstly analyse the comprehensive influence of terrain slope and soil strength to vehicle’s off-road trafficability. Given off-road area, the GO or NO-GO tabu table of terrain gird is determined by slope angle and soil remolding cone index (RCI). By applying tabu table and grid weight table, the influence of terrain slope and soil RCI are coordinated to reduce the search scope of algorithm and improve search efficiency. Simulation results based on tracked vehicle M1A1 in off-road environment show that, improved ant colony path planning algorithm not only considers the influence of actual terrain and soil, but also improves computation efficiency. The time cost of optimal routing computation is much lower which is essential for real time off-road path planning scenarios.