International Journal of Computer Applications |
Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA |
Volume 67 - Number 8 |
Year of Publication: 2013 |
Authors: Daniel Opoku, Abdollah Homaifar, Edward Tunstel |
10.5120/11417-6753 |
Daniel Opoku, Abdollah Homaifar, Edward Tunstel . The A-r-Star (Ar) Pathfinder. International Journal of Computer Applications. 67, 8 ( April 2013), 32-44. DOI=10.5120/11417-6753
This paper presents a variant of the A-Star (A^*) pathfinder for robot path planning calledA_r^* (pronounced A-r-Star)and demonstrates that the A_r^*algorithm outperforms A^* in a uniformly gridded sparse world and gives performance matching that of A^* in a uniformly gridded cluttered world. This algorithm is simple to implement and understand. It alsohighlights the performance advantages of theA_r^*algorithm and proves its properties experimentally and analytically (where appropriate). Some challenges affecting the performance of A_r^*have been presented and some solutions to these challenges have been developed and implemented. The performance of A_r^*has been compared toA^*running on both uniform and multi-resolution grids of different world scenarios. Results show that on a sparse high-resolution uniform grid worldA_r^*'s search speed scales well and it outperforms A^* by an exponential factor.