Abstract: A smooth path planning method based on improved ant colony algorithm is proposed for mobile robot in this paper. In order to overcome the disadvantage of slow convergence rate of ant colony algorithm in solving path planning problem, the initial value and updating method of the matrix of heuristic factors are improved. Compared with the results that the heuristic factor has not been improved, the average path length is reduced by 17.6%, and the average convergence algebra is decreased by 93.1%. The control point transfer strategy is proposed to solve the problem of large cumulative turning angle of the robot when obstacles exist in the grid environment. Based on the previous improvement, a smooth improvement of path planning is achieved by transferring the central point of grid to the vertex of grid. The path planning simulation results show that the average path length of the robot is decreased by 4.28% and the cumulative turning angle is reduced by 52.58%, compared with the non-smooth improvement.

Key words: ant colony algorithm, mobile robot, path planning, control point transfer strategy