A comparative study of A-star algorithms for search and rescue in perfect maze
Xiang Liu, Daoxiong Gong · 2011
Robots can be widely used to fulfill the task of search and rescue trapped persons in some dangerous situations, which can be abstracted as a maze. Three A-star algorithms are studied in this paper to compare the maze searching capacity and efficiency of their different heuristic functions, and the depth-first search algorithm, which has no heuristic information, is also adopted as a benchmark to judge the usefulness of the 3 heuristic functions of A-star algorithms. Experiments validated the usefulness of heuristic function with the results that the A-star algorithms outperform the depth-first search algorithm in most cases, and the A-star algorithm with the Euclidean distance from the father point of current point to the target point included in the heuristic function shows the best performance.