A comparative study of A-star algorithms for search and rescue in perfect maze

• Published in: 2011 International Conference on Electric Information and Control Engineering pp. 24 - 27
• Main Authors: Xiang Liu, Daoxiong Gong
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.04.2011
• Subjects: A-star algorithm; Algorithm design and analysis; Complexity theory; Euclidean distance; Heuristic algorithms; Maze search; Robot kinematics; Robot sensing systems; the depth-first search algorithm
• ISBN: 1424480361; 9781424480364
• DOI: 10.1109/ICEICE.2011.5777723

Robots can be widely used to fulfill the task of search and rescue trapped persons in some dangerous situations, which can be abstracted as a maze. Three A-star algorithms are studied in this paper to compare the maze searching capacity and efficiency of their different heuristic functions, and the depth-first search algorithm, which has no heuristic information, is also adopted as a benchmark to judge the usefulness of the 3 heuristic functions of A-star algorithms. Experiments validated the usefulness of heuristic function with the results that the A-star algorithms outperform the depth-first search algorithm in most cases, and the A-star algorithm with the Euclidean distance from the father point of current point to the target point included in the heuristic function shows the best performance.