Robot Path Planning for Maze Navigation
Dimitris C. Dracopoulos
Brunel University
Department of Computer Science
London, UK
E-mail: Dimitris .DracopoulosQbrunel.ac .uk .
Abstract- This paper presents the application of niul-
tilayer perceptrons to the robot path planning prob-
lem, and in particular to the task of maze navigation.
Previous published results implied that the training of
feedforward multilayered networks failed, because of the
non-smoothness of data. Here the same maze problem
is revisited.
1. Introduction
0 N E of the major components for the creation of
autonomous robots is the ability of a robot to
“plan its paths” and in general the ability to “plan its
motion”. In a limited or carefully engineered environ-
ment it is possible to program the robot for all possible
combinations of motions in order to accomplish specific
tasks [l]. But even when this is possible, one would like
to tell the robot “what” to do, rather than “how” to
do it, making its operation much easier [l].
In general however, “pre-programming” a robot for
all possible cases or conditions it will meet is impossi-
ble, due to the fact that the number of motion combi-
nations can be large or infinite (as is the case in non-
tracked systems). In addition, it is highly desirable
to have robots which are able to adapt and operate
in unknown or (changing environments. Adaptation,
robustness and operation in a wide range of environ-
ments, provides robots with a higher degree of “in-
telligence”. Such an intelligence can be achieved only
through learning.
This paper considersthe application of artificial neu-
ral networks (and more specifically multilayer percep-
trons) to robot path planning. The problem which is
addressed here is that of maze navigation.
Apart from the obvious industrial applications the
solution of such a problem is inspired from daily life.
Humans seem to be able to find their optimal path
through rooms they have not visited before, without
keep bumping or colliding with the various obstacles
that lie in the room. Somehow, they are able to
“see” the obstacles and make an appropriate optimum
path planning so as t o avoid them [2]. In contrast
with this, many path planning techniques (including
machine learning algorithms) seem to lead the robot
through a room and attempt to “force” the robot to
1/98 $1 O.oOO1998 IEEE
0-7803-4859- 2081
learn its future path, after a number of collisions with
obstacles in the environment. Such an approach be-
sides being an unnatural way (when compared with
humans), it is infeasible for most real industrial appli-
cations, as the result of a robot colliding with its en-
vironment can be catastrophic for the robot itself and
damaging for the environment.
The next section provides some background in path
planning and relevant techniques. Section 3 describes
the simple maze problem considered here, and section
4 proposes an artificial neural network architecture for
the solution of the maze problem along with the re-
sults obtained from this approach. Finally, section 5
summarises what was achieved and gives directions for
future work.
2. Path planning
The general problem of path planning for au-
tonomous robots is defined as the search for a path
which a robot (with specified geometry) has to follow
in a described environment, in order to reach a particu-
lar position and orientation B , given an initial position
and orientation A (Figure 1). The path is subject to
certain constraints which serve t o avoid obstacle col-
lision and optimise the performance of the robot (e.g.
find the path with the minimum distance, or find the
path which minimises the energy spent by the robot).
Sometimes the motion of a robot is restricted to par-
ticular paths or roadways, the railway tracks [3]. In
this case, the problem of path planning is equivalent
to that of graph search and any of the graph search
algorithms can be utilised (e.g. A* or Dijkstra’s algo-
rithm). In general however, systems are non-tracked
and the number of routes a robot can follow is infinite.
Real robot path planning becomes even more com-
plicated due to the fact that the shape of the robot has
to be taken into account. A tool which is commonly
used to face this extra complication is the configuration
space. The robot’s configuration space C represents the
robot as a point and maps the obstacles in this space
in an appropriate way. This mapping transforms the
problem of planning the motion of a dimensioned ob-
ject into the problem of planning the motion of a point

Figure 1. Path plianning: the robot would l i e to move
from the position and orientation A to the position
and orientation B avoiding the shaded obstacles.
[l].The full mathematical analysis of a path planning
problem using the configuration space is too complex
as the number of dimensions increases, therefore other
techniques have 1;o be used in combination with the
Configuration space.
Potential fields is one of the most popular methods.
Following this approach, the robot resembles a parti-
cle which is moving under the influence of a potential
field created by the target configuration (position and
orientation of t b e robot) and the obstacles in the C
space. The target is considered t o be charged nega-
tively which makes the robot being attracted from it,
while the obstacles have a positive charge resulting in
a robot motion which avoids the obstacles. The to-
tal potential field. (with a negative gradient) applies a
force to the robot which pulls it towards the goal. The
direction of this force defines the robot’s trajectory.
A number of pcAential field algorithms exist. Many of
them suffer from the problem of local minima. Depend-
ing on the charges of the obstacles and the goal config-
uration, the robot may be leaded to a position where
the force asked upon it is zero. In such a situation it
cannot move any more and it is trapped. To overcome
this problem, thie potential field methods have to be
able to design potential functions which have no local
minima (something which is not always easy and in
general it is computationally complex), or to employ
mechanisms which allow the robot t o escape from local
minima. Still however, the computational complexity
of the path planning increases exponentially with the
dimension of the robot’s conflguration space [l]. An
additional complication which becomes a problem for
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the application of such techniques, is an environment
which is changing dynamically (e.g. if the obstacles
axe not fixed but they are moving). In such a case,
the potential function depends on time t and its design
is an extremelly difllcult or impossible task (consider
the extreme w e where the obstacles are moving in an
unknown way, i.e. the environment is unknown).
Besides the environmental constraints which add an
additional level of difficulty t o the path planning prob-
lem, there are also kinematic constraints in the motion
of the robot. Two broad categories for the kinematic
constraints are usually considered holonomic and non-
holonomic constraints. The former reduces the dimen-
sion of the configuration space attainable by the robot,
while the latter reduces the number of possible motions.
For example, a car-robot is subject t o holonomic con-
straints as its motion is restricted t o be always along
its main axis.
3. The maze problem
It is well known that maze navigation is an important
task in robotics. The maze problem considered in this
paper was proposed by Werbos in [4]. This problem was
used as a testbed for the capability of different artificial
neural networks to approximate non-smooth functions.
As pointed out in [2], the testbed was established due
to the fact that the team in [5] was unable to succeed
in the training of a multilayer perceptron to solve the
problem.
The task is defined as follows: Given a maze of the
type shown in Figure 2 (which may vary in size, num-
ber of dimensions or the configurationof the obstacles),
find an appropriate path which moves a robot from an
initial position I to a target position G, while minimis-
ing the distance which the robot has t o travel.
In [4], [SI a specialised neural network architecture,
based on simultaneous recurrent networks was designed
to approximate the dynamic programing J function
of the maze navigation problem. Such an approxima-
tion is crucial for adaptive critics neurocontrol meth-
ods. These methods are approximate dynamic pro-
gramming (ADP) techniques: given a utility function U
which has t o be maximized over all future time (which
could be an infinite or a finite time horizon), find an
approximation of the strategic utility function J, for
which maximization in the short term will maximize U
in the long term [6]. Exact dynamic programming is
too “expensive” computationally for complex dynamic
systems or large problems, therefore ADP methods are
used. A neural network (called the critic network)
learns t o output (predict) an approximation J* of the
function J. Thus the Bellman equation in dynamic

X. X ner, including humans. In particular, such a case may
1 g
Figure 2. The maze problem: And the full optimum
path which will lead the robot from the position
(xi,y;) to the position (xerye).
programming [7] is not
(1)
solved exactly, but it is replaced by a neural network
able to approximate J(R) by J*(R) [8].
However, in [4],[e] the emphasis was given in the
capability of the simultaneous recurrent network ar-
chitecture to approximate the J function, rather than
solving the path planning problem for the 5 by 5 maze
of Figure 2. In addixion, the results presented the ap-
proximation of the ,J function for a particular target
goal, although recent experiments with the proposed
SRN architecture [2], seemed to give promising results
for generalisation in different mazes. Generalisation in
cases where are ‘“seen” by the planner (either for dif-
ferent initial and final conditions or for different mazes)
has a great importance for real world path planning
applications. Letting a robot to move around a fixed
environment colliding with objects and become famil-
iar with it, in order to perform again exactly the same
navigation task, is an approach of limited usefulness.
Besides the cost involved in such techniques (due to
the damages occurecl with the collisions), the necessity
for intelligent behaviour defined by properties such as
adaptivity and robulstness, makes their application in-
appropriate for mamy cases. After all, humans are able
to “see” their near optimum path, when they arrive in
a room €or the fist time.
Intelligent behaviour of a robot can be achieved only
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if the robot is capable of learning. Artificial neural net-
works have learning properties which make them ideal
candidates for robot motion planning. However, a neu-
ral network application was unsuccessful for a problem
of this type [5]. The next section proposes a neural
architecture for the solution of the maze problem de-
scribed here.
4. Neural Path Planning
The maze problem illustrated in Figure 2 has an ex-
tra complication, which is not apparent when one con-
siders the problem for the first time. For each of the
cells and a specific goal position, there is more than one
equally good direction [6]. Some of the cells have up
to four equally good directions, as there are four dif-
ferent paths which are optimum for the target config-
uration. This can be very confusing for any path plan-
cause many difficulties for the training of artificial neu-
ral networks. Since the mapping between current state
and next adionlcurrent state is one-to-many, multi-
layer perceptrons will learn an incorrect model. This is
true because standard supervised learning algorithms
average over multiple targets, assuming a squared er-
ror criterion function [8]. In addition, such data can
be non-smooth and training based on such data can
be very difficult or impossible for most networks (this
was the motivation for the work on specialised more
powerful SRN networks in [6]).
The approach which is tested here is based on feed-
forward backpropagation-type neural networks. Al-
though such networks suffer from the problem of local
minima, in practice it is found that many local minima
give good results. In addition a global minimum, based
on the total error of the training data does not guar-
antee or imply that the generdisation of the network
will be better. However, one could apply a straightfor-
ward validation test (by splitting the available data in
three sets) and decide the point which the training of
the network should be stopped [8].
The network used here is trained to predict the di-
rection that the robot should move at the next time
step. Hence, one output node is used. The inputs to
the network are the current position of the robot (z,y)
and its target position (zg,yg). A network architec-
ture with two hidden layers and a total size of 4-10-
10-1 was used (Figure 3), after having done a number
of experiments, in order to determine it. However, no
real effort in optimising the network architecture was
attempted.
The training set consisted of 174 distinct data, map-
ping the current position and target position to the
optimum action. These training data were generated
 4 North, South, East or West
t
X
t
Y
tX
t accuracy is very desirable in real world path planning
g
Figure 3. The arlchitecture of the network used. The in-
puts to the network are the current robot position
(x,y) and its goal (+,yg). Its output determines
whether the robot will move North, South, East
or West at ,the next time step.
from the optimum full paths of 50 trajectories. The
trajectories were chosen from 50 different initial-target
conditions. The generation of training data taken out
of optimum full trajectories makes the training of the
network an easier task, as the data produced in this
way are “smoother”. The target values in the output
node were scaled in the range [-0.9,0.9] so as to avoid
the “saturated areas” of the sigmoidal function used.
Standard multilayer perceptron training can be sig-
niscantly improved in terms of speed convergence if an
adaptive learning rate is used [9]. In all of the experi-
ments described here, a different rule for adapting the
learning rate a was used as follows:
= {
0 . 7 ~ , if
error
1.05a, otherwise
’1-04
Using this learning rate update after each iteration of
the training samples, not only speeds up the process of
learning but can also help to avoid many local minima.
The initial value which was used here for the learning
rate was 0.02. tn addition, the learning rule used to
update the weights utilised the standard momentum
term with a coefficient of 0.7.
The possible number of combinations for inputs and
outputs to the network is 462 (if one ignores the trivial
case where the initial and final conditions are the same,
so the robot does not have to move). The described
feedforward network, learned perfectly the 174 train-
ing samples and its training was stopped after 50,000
iterations. The remaining 288 samples were used to
test the generalisation capability of the network. Out
of the 288 test data, the network predicted correctly
the next move of the robot in 203 cases. This is based
in the assumption that only one move out of the four is
correct (hypothesis of uniqueness) and priority of cor-
rectness is given according to the order: North, South,
East, West. That is, if more than one moves lead the
robot to an optimum path, we count as correct only
the move which comes first in the described order (this
assumption was made as the training targets were gen-
erated in the same fashion). However, if one accepts
as correct prediction any of the moves which lead the
robot t o the optimum path (something which is much
more realistic and the true case), then the generalisa-
tion capability of the network exceeds 80%. Such a high
problems.
5. Conclusions and future work
This work presented how multilayer perceptrons can
be applied to the robot path planning problem. For this
purpose, the task of maze navigation was considered.
Previously published work indicated that the problem
could not be solved, using the standard feedforward
backpropagation type networks [5]. The results shown
here suggest, that such an approach is not only feasible
for path planning problems, but also that the accuracy
which can be achieved is quite high.
Future work has to demonstrate how well the neural
architecture will scale when applied to mazes of differ-
ent size or to mazes where the robot has more degrees
of freedom. Although initially it can be thought that
more degrees of freedom make the problem more dif-
ficult, such a case will generate much smoother data,
something which usually makes the training of multi-
layer perceptrons an easier task.
(2) References
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Paul J. Werbos, ”, 1996, personal communication.
Stephen Cameron, “Obstacle avoidance and path planning” ,
Industrial Robot, vol. 21, no. 5, 1994.
Paul J. Werbos and Xiaozhong Pang, “Generalized maze
navigation: SRN critics solve what feedforward or hebbian
nets cannot”, in World Congress on Neuml Networks, Son
Diego, California. September 1996, pp. 88-93, Lawrence Erl-
baum Associates,Inc. and INNS Press.
P. Houillon and A. Caron, “Planar robot control in clut-
tered space by artificial neural network”, Journal of Math
Modeling and Computing, pp. 498-502, 1993.
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[6] Xiaozhong Pang and Paul J. Werbos, "Neural network de-
sign for J function a.pproximationin dynamic programming",
Neural Networks, t D appear.
[7] Dimitri P. Bertsekas and John N. Tsitsiklis, Neuro-Dynamic
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[SI Dimitris C. Dracopoulos, Evolutionary Learning Algorithms
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