An Advanced Quantum Optimization Algorithm for Robot Path Planning

In this paper, a new robot path planning algorithm based on Quantum-inspired Evolutionary Algorithm (QEA) is proposed. QEA is an advanced evolutionary computing scheme with the quantum computing features such as qubits and superposition. It is suitable for solving large scale optimization problems. The proposed QEA algorithm works in the discretized environment, and approximates the optimal robot planing path in a highly computationally efficient fashion. The simulation results indicate that the proposed QEA algorithm is suitable for both complex static and dynamic environment and considerably outperforms the conventional genetic algorithm (GA) for solving the robot path planning problem. Our algorithm runs in only about 2[Formula: see text]s, which demonstrates that it can well tackle the optimization problem in robot path planning.