Path planning algorithm for mobile robots based on clustering-obstacles and quintic trigonometric Bézier curve

Finding a collision-free feasible path for mobile robots is very important because they are essential in many fields such as healthcare, military, and industry. In this paper, a novel Clustering Obstacles (CO)-based path planning algorithm for mobile robots is presented using a quintic trigonometric Bézier curve and its two shape parameters. The CO-based algorithm forms clusters of geometrically shaped obstacles and finds the cluster centers. Moreover, the proposed waypoint algorithm (WP) finds the waypoints of the predefined skeleton path in addition to the start and destination points in an environment. Based on all these points, the predefined quintic trigonometric Bézier path candidates, taking the skeleton path as their convex hull, are then generated using the shape parameters of this curve. Moreover, the performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with K-Means and agglomerative hierarchical algorithms to obtain the quintic trigonometric Bézier paths desired by the user. The experimental results show that the CO-based path planning algorithm achieves better cluster centers and consequently better collision-free predefined paths.