Global path planning for unmanned vehicles based on improved A* algorithm

The traditional A* algorithm has many turns, long paths, and slow speed in the global path planning of unmanned vehicles. For these problems, this paper proposes an improvement scheme. Add a reverse search from the end point to the starting point and generate a straight-line path between two nodes when judging that there is no obstacle between the target nodes in both directions. In addition, redundant nodes are eliminated, and the path is smoothed based on cubic B spline curves. Simulation results show that compared with the traditional A* algorithm, the path planned by the improved A* algorithm has shorter length, fewer and smoother turns, and the planning time is reduced by 14%-75%, which achieves the optimization of the path planning of the A* algorithm.