A global path planning Java-based system for autonomous mobile robots

We present an autonomous robot motion planning system developed in Java. This interactive system enables users to set up the working environment by creating obstacles and a robot of different shapes, specifying starting and goal positions and setting other path or environment parameters from a user-friendly interface. A collision-free path is computed upon specifying the goal point. The path planning system involves several phases: collision detection, obstacle avoidance, free-path generation and then selecting the shortest one. Each of these modules is complex and therefore we provide the possibility of visualizing graphically the output of each phase. It has been shown that this system can be an effective computer-aided learning (CAL) tool in classroom teaching and/or motivating junior researchers in this field of research to further implement practical complex systems. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.