Abstract: An improved algorithm is proposed to address the problems of slow convergence speed and multiple turns in traditional ant colony algorithm for robot path planning. Firstly, a corner heuristic function is introduced to increase the directionality of node selection and reduce the number of corners. Secondly, a new pheromone updating mechanism is proposed to update the pheromone concentration of high-quality ants twice to speed up the convergence of the algorithm. Finally, experiments are conducted on the improved algorithm using simulation software. The simulation experimental results show that the performance of the improved algorithm has greatly improved. In two different complexity environments, the number of iterations has decreased by 82.1% and 87.6%, respectively, and the number of corners has decreased by 36.8%, verifying the superiority of the improved algorithm.

Key words: ant colony, mobile robot, path planning