Robots in Partially Known and Unknown Environments: A Simulated Annealing Approach for Re-Planning

The path planning problem using mobile robots, also known as robot motion planning, is a key problem in robotics. The goal is to find a collision-free path from a starting point to a target point in an environment with obstacles. These obstacles can be known, partially unknown, or completely unknown to the robot. The robot’s decisions are different according to its degree of knowledge of the environment. If the environment is fully known, using an offline approach is sufficient. Otherwise, online techniques are required to find a path. They must be fast, effective, and adaptive to tackle the complexity of changing environments. In this work, we propose a framework based on a simulated annealing approach to solve the path planning problem with different degrees of knowledge of the environment for the robot. We evaluate our approach with a set of large-scale instances with different features. The results show that our framework can quickly find quality solutions and is also able to manage environmental changes.