Hybrid adaptive differential evolution for mobile robot localization

This paper introduces a new evolutionary optimization algorithm named hybrid adaptive differential evolution (HADE) and applies it to the mobile robot localization problem. The behaviour of evolutionary algorithms is highly dependent on the parameter selection. This algorithm utilizes an adaptive method to tune the mutation parameter to enhance the rate of convergence and eliminate the need for manual tuning. A hybrid method for mutation is also introduced to give more diversity to the population. This method which constantly switches between two mutation schemes guarantees a sufficient level of diversity to avoid local optima. We use a well-known test set in continuous domain to evaluate HADE’s performance against the standard version of differential evolution (DE) and a self-adaptive version of the algorithm. The results show that HADE outperforms DE and self-adaptive DE in three of four benchmarks. Moreover, we investigate the performance of HADE in the well-known localization problem of mobile robots. Results show that HADE is capable of estimating the robot’s pose accurately with a decreased number of individuals needed for convergence compared with DE and particle swarm optimization methods. Comparative study exposes HADE algorithm as a competitive method for mobile robot localization.