A Multi-pipe Path Planning by Modified Ant Colony Optimization

Path planning in 3D geometry space is used to find an optimal path in the restricted environment,according to a certain evaluation criteria.To solve the problem of long searching time and slow solving speed in 3D path planning,a modified ant colony optimization is proposed in this paper.Firstly,the grid method for environment modeling is adopted.Heuristic information is connected with the planning space.A semi-iterative global pheromone update mechanism is proposed.Secondly,the optimal ants mutate the paths to improve the diversity of the algorithm after a defined iterative number.Thirdly,co-evolutionary algorithm is used.Finally,the simulation result shows the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in solving the problem of 3D pipe path planning.