Enhanced ant colony algorithm with communication mechanism for mobile robot path planning

In mobile robot path planning, the ant colony algorithm has the problem that the historical paths explored by ants cannot be fully utilized. With this in mind, in this paper an enhanced ant colony algorithm with a communication mechanism is proposed. The communication mechanism is inspired by the contact of ant tentacles in nature, which can integrate historical paths to obtain a better composite path. To further improve the algorithm, an enlarged roulette method is presented to accelerate the convergence. Subsequently, an adaptive sigmoid attenuation function is designed to optimize the heuristic information at different stages. The various forms of the deadlock problem are analyzed and specific strategies formulated. Finally, parameter determination and comparison experiments are carried out. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method and its considerable advantages in enhancing the performance of the ant colony algorithm.