Performance Comparison of Classical and Neural Sampling Algorithms for Robotic Navigation
For robotic and UAV navigation, this work demonstrates that AI-guided sampling can improve path quality, though the improvement is incremental over existing methods.
The paper compares RRT*, Neural RRT*, and Neural Informed RRT* for robotic navigation in environments with convex and concave obstacles. Neural-guided planners produce up to 14% shorter paths and 55-75% smoother trajectories than RRT*, with Neural Informed RRT* achieving the best overall performance.
Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into sampling-based motion planning provides new possibilities for improving autonomous navigation efficiency. In this paper, three algorithms, namely RRT*, Neural RRT*, and Neural Informed RRT*, are implemented and evaluated on environments containing convex and concave obstacles with different obstacle densities. The obtained results indicate that neural-guided planners improve path quality, producing up to 14\% shorter paths and 55--75\% smoother trajectories compared with the conventional RRT* algorithm. Among the evaluated methods, Neural Informed RRT* achieves the best overall performance in terms of path length and trajectory smoothness. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of AI-guided sampling strategies for improving reliability and trajectory efficiency in robotic and UAV navigation, despite a slight increase in computation time. Overall, the study highlights the growing importance of artificial intelligence in real-time robotic path planning applications.