Experimental evaluation of robot path planning by artificial potential field approach with simulated annealing

The artificial potential field (APF) methods provide simple and effective motion planners for practical purpose. However, artificial potential field approach has a major problem which is that a robot is trapped at a local minimum before reaching it's goal. The avoidance of local minimum has been an active research topic in path planning by potential field. As one of the powerful techniques for escaping local minimum, simulated annealing has been applied to local and global path planning. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate the mobile robot path planning technique which integrates the artificial potential field approach with simulated annealing (SA).