Abstract
The subject of navigation has drawn a large interest in the last few years. Navigation problem (or path planning) finds the path between two points, source location and destination location. In smart cities, solving navigation problem is essential to all residents and visitors of such cities to guide them to move easily between locations. Also, the navigation problem is very important in case of moving robots that move around the city or part of it to get some certain tasks done such as delivering packages, delivering food, etc. In either case, solution to the navigation is essential.
The core to navigation systems is the navigation algorithms they employ. Navigation algorithms can be classified into navigation algorithms that depend on maps and navigation without the use of maps. The map contains all available routes and its directions. In this proposal, we consider the first class.
In this paper, we are interested in getting path planning solutions very fast. In doing so, we employ a parallel platform, Reconfigurable mesh (R-Mesh), to compute the path from source location to destination location. R-Mesh is a parallel platform that has very fast solutions to many problems and can be deployed in moving vehicles and moving robots.
This paper presents two algorithms for path planning. The first assumes maps with linear streets. The second considers maps with branching streets. In both algorithms, the quality of the path is evaluated in terms of the length of the path and the number of turns in the path.