“…Path planning task is often modeled as an optimization problem, where a decision variable represents a given path, i.e., the sequence of points (or movements) by which the robot must move; the cost function is a certain criteria or metric whose value is optimized (e.g., distance, energy consumption, and execution time). Thus, various optimization techniques have been applied to solve path planning problems, e.g., genetic algorithm (GA) [5]- [7], A* [8], particle swarm optimization (PSO) [9], nonlinear programming (NLP) [10], and ant colony [11]. However, these optimization techniques are unable to ensure the global optimality of the robot path, although they are able to provide results sufficiently fast for on-line path planning applications.…”