CONFIRM Smart4.0 Fellow A’Qilah Ahmad Dahalan recently took part in the International Invention, Innovation & Technology Exhibition (ITEX) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and won a gold medal gold in the automation and manufacturing classification. ITEX features the best innovations from Asia and beyond. Initiated by the malaysian Invention and Design Society (MINDS) in 1989 as MINDEX, today ITEX is the region’s leading exhibition to showcase new inventions, technologies and products, targeted at securing investment, manufacturing and commercialisation partners. The exhibition features inventions across fifteen classifications related to innovation or technology. ITEX is Malaysia’s longest-running invention, innovation and technology exhibition.
A’Qilah’s winning entry was a 2D robot navigation simulator, its algorithm is ready to be integrated into any AUV or the equivalent. Currently, designing path-planning concepts for autonomous robot systems remains a topic of high interest. Her work uses computational analysis through a numerical approach to deal with the path-planning problem with obstacle avoidance over a robot simulation. Based on the potential field produced by Laplace’s equation, the formation of a potential function throughout the simulation configuration regions is obtained. This potential field is typically employed as a guide in the global approach of robot path planning. Several extended variants of the over-relaxation technique are presented to obtain the potential field that is used for solving the path-planning problem. Experimental results with a robot simulator are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach in computing harmonic potential for solving the path-planning problem. In addition to successfully validating pathways generated from various locations, it is also demonstrated that the extended over-relaxation algorithms outperform in terms of the number of iterations as well as execution time.