Mechanical Sciences (Jul 2020)
Spatial cellular robot in orbital truss collision-free path planning
Abstract
Aiming at the problem of moving path planning of a cellular robot on trusses in space station, a triangular prism truss is taken as the research object, and an optimized ant colony algorithm incorporating a gravitational search algorithm is proposed. The innovative use of the hierarchical search strategy which limits the exploration area, the use of gravity search algorithm to get the optimal solution of truss nodes, and further transform it into the initial value of pheromone in ant colony algorithm, can effectively prevent the algorithm from falling into the local optimal solution in the early stage, and make the optimization algorithm have a faster convergence speed. This paper proposes a heuristic function including the angle between the targets, which can effectively avoid blind search in the early stage and improve the ability of path search. The simulation results show that the path and planning time of the cellular robot can be effectively reduced when choosing truss path.