Reliability-Based Multivehicle Path Planning Under Uncertainty Using a Bio-Inspired Approach

Abstract Identifying a reliable path in uncertain environments is essential for designing reliable off-road autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs) considering postdesign operations. This article presents a novel bio-inspired approach for model-based multivehicle mission planning under uncertainty for off-road AGVs subjected to mobility reliability constraints in dynamic environments. A physics-based vehicle dynamics simulation model is first employed to predict vehicle mobility (i.e., maximum attainable speed) for any given terrain and soil conditions. Based on physics-based simulations, the vehicle state mobility reliability in operation is then analyzed using an adaptive surrogate modeling method to overcome the computational challenges in mobility reliability analysis by adaptively constructing a surrogate. Subsequently, a bio-inspired approach called Physarum-based algorithm is used in conjunction with a navigation mesh to identify an optimal path satisfying a specific mobility reliability requirement. The developed Physarum-based framework is applied to reliability-based path planning for both a single-vehicle and multiple-vehicle scenarios. A case study is used to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methods and algorithms. The results show that the proposed framework can effectively identify optimal paths for both scenarios of single and multiple vehicles. The required computational time is less than the widely used Dijkstra-based method.