In this paper, a novel hierarchical global path planning approach for mobile robots in a cluttered environment is proposed. This approach has a three-level structure to obtain a feasible, safe and optimal path. In the first level, the triangular decomposition method is used to quickly establish a geometric free configuration space of the robot. In the second level, Dijkstra's algorithm is applied to find a collision-free path used as input reference for the next level. Lastly, a proposed particle swarm optimization called constrained multi-objective particle swarm optimization with an accelerated update methodology based on Pareto dominance principle is employed to generate the global optimal path with the focus on minimizing the path length and maximizing the path smoothness. The contribution of this work consists in: (i) The development of a novel optimal hierarchical global path planning approach for mobile robots moving in a cluttered environment; (ii) The development of proposed particle swarm optimization with an accelerated update methodology based on Pareto dominance principle to solve robot path planning problems; (iii) Providing optimal global robot paths in terms of the path length and the path smoothness taking into account the physical robot system limitations with computational efficiency. Simulation results in various types of environments are conducted in order to illustrate the superiority of the hierarchical approach. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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