Performance Comparison of Novel WNN Approach with RBFNN in Navigation of Autonomous Mobile Robotic Agent

Abstract

This paper addresses the performance comparison of Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBFNN) with novel Wavelet Neural Network (WNN) of designing intelligent controllers for path planning of mobile robot in an unknown environment. In the proposed WNN, different types of activation functions such as Mexican Hat, Gaussian and Morlet wavelet functions are used in the hidden nodes. The neural networks are trained by an intelligent supervised learning technique so that the robot makes a collision-free path in the unknown environment during navigation from different starting points to targets/goals. The efficiency of two algorithms is compared using some MATLAB simulations and experimental setup with Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller in terms of path length and time taken to reach the target as an indicator for the accuracy of the network models.