Path planning and obstacle avoidance are essential for autonomous driving cars. On the base of a self‐constructed smart obstacle avoidance car, which used a LeTMC‐520 depth camera and Jetson controller, this paper established a map of an unknown indoor environment based on depth information via SLAM technology. The Dijkstra algorithm is used as the global path planning algorithm and the dynamic window approach (DWA) as its local path planning algorithm, which are applied to the smart car, enabling it to successfully avoid obstacles from the planned initial position and reach the designated position. The tests on the smart car prove that the system can complete the functions of environment map establishment, path planning and navigation, and obstacle avoidance.

A fusion pathfinding algorithm based on the optimized A-star algorithm, the artificial potential field method and the least squares method is proposed to meet the performance requirements of path smoothing, response speed and computation time for the path planning of home cleaning robots. The fusion algorithm improves the operation rules of the traditional A-star algorithm, enabling global path planning to be completed quickly. At the same time, the operating rules of the artificial potential field method are changed according to the path points found by the optimal A-star algorithm, thus greatly avoiding the dilemma of being trapped in local optima. Finally, the least squares method is applied to fit the complete path to obtain a smooth path trajectory. Experiments show that the fusion algorithm significantly improves pathfinding efficiency and produces smoother and more continuous paths. Through simulation comparison experiments, the optimized A-star algorithm reduced path-planning time by 60% compared to the traditional A-star algorithm and 65.2% compared to the bidirectional A-star algorithm path-planning time. The fusion algorithm reduced the path-planning time by 65.2% compared to the ant colony algorithm and 83.64% compared to the RRT algorithm path-planning time.

To address the shortcomings of the whale optimization algorithm (WOA) in terms of insufficient global search ability and slow convergence speed, a differential evolution chaotic whale optimization algorithm (DECWOA) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the initial population is generated by introducing the Sine chaos theory at the beginning of the algorithm to increase the population diversity. Secondly, new adaptive inertia weights are introduced into the individual whale position update formula to lay the foundation for the global search and improve the optimization performance of the algorithm. Finally, the differential variance algorithm is fused to improve the global search speed and accuracy of the whale optimization algorithm. The impact of various improvement strategies on the performance of the algorithm is analyzed using different kinds of test functions that are randomly selected. The particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO), butterfly optimization algorithm (BOA), WOA, chaotic feedback adaptive whale optimization algorithm (CFAWOA), and DECWOA algorithm are compared for the optimal search performance. Experimental simulations are performed using MATLAB software, and the results show that the improved whale optimization algorithm has a better global optimization-seeking capability. The improved whale optimization algorithm is applied to the distribution network fault location of IEEE-33 nodes, and the effectiveness and accuracy of the distribution network fault zone location based on the multistrategy improved whale optimization algorithm is verified.

Aiming at the shortcomings of the traditional sparrow search algorithm (SSA) in path planning, such as its high time-consumption, long path length, it being easy to collide with static obstacles and its inability to avoid dynamic obstacles, this paper proposes a new improved SSA based on multi-strategies. Firstly, Cauchy reverse learning was used to initialize the sparrow population to avoid a premature convergence of the algorithm. Secondly, the sine–cosine algorithm was used to update the producers’ position of the sparrow population and balance the global search and local exploration capabilities of the algorithm. Then, a Lévy flight strategy was used to update the scroungers’ position to avoid the algorithm falling into the local optimum. Finally, the improved SSA and dynamic window approach (DWA) were combined to enhance the local obstacle avoidance ability of the algorithm. The proposed novel algorithm is named ISSA-DWA. Compared with the traditional SSA, the path length, path turning times and execution time planned by the ISSA-DWA are reduced by 13.42%, 63.02% and 51.35%, respectively, and the path smoothness is improved by 62.29%. The experimental results show that the ISSA-DWA proposed in this paper can not only solve the shortcomings of the SSA but can also plan a highly smooth path safely and efficiently in the complex dynamic obstacle environment.

To address the problem that large pedestrian detection networks cannot be directly applied to small device scenarios due to the heavyweight and slow detection speed, this paper proposes a pedestrian detection and recognition model MobileNet-YoLo based on the YoLov4-tiny target detection framework. To address the problem of low accuracy of YoLov4-tiny, MobileNetv3 is used to optimize its backbone feature extraction network, and the MFF model is proposed to fuse the output of the first two layers to solve the information loss problem, and the attention mechanism CBAM is introduced after strengthening the feature extraction network to further improve the detection efficiency; then the 3 × 3 convolution is replaced by the depth separable convolution, which greatly reduces the number of parameters and thus improves the detection rate, then propose Ordinary data augmentation to efficiently augment the dataset and dynamically adjust the target detection anchor frame using the k-means++ clustering algorithm. Finally, the model weights trained by the VOC2007 + 2012 dataset were applied to the pedestrian dataset for retraining by the transfer learning method, which effectively solved the problem of scarce samples and greatly shortened the training time. The experimental results on the VOC2007 + 2012 dataset show that the average means accuracy of the MobileNet-YoLo model compared to YoLov4-tiny, MobileNet-YoLov4, MobileNet-YoLov3, and YoLov5s by 5.00%, 1.30%, 3.23%, and 0.74%, respectively and have reached the level to realize the landed application.

Short-term power load forecasting plays a key role in daily scheduling and ensuring stable power system operation. The problem of the volatility of the power load sequence and poor prediction accuracy is addressed. In this study, a learning model integrating intelligent optimization algorithms is proposed, which combines an ensemble-learning model based on long short-term memory (LSTM), variational modal decomposition (VMD) and the multi-strategy optimization dung beetle algorithm (MODBO). The aim is to address the shortcomings of the dung beetle optimizer algorithm (DBO) in power load forecasting, such as its time-consuming nature, low accuracy, and ease of falling into local optimum. In this paper, firstly, the dung beetle algorithm is initialized using a lens-imaging reverse-learning strategy to avoid premature convergence of the algorithm. Second, a spiral search strategy is used to update the dynamic positions of the breeding dung beetles to balance the local and global search capabilities. Then, the positions of the foraging dung beetles are updated using an optimal value bootstrapping strategy to avoid falling into a local optimum. Finally, the dynamic-weighting coefficients are used to update the position of the stealing dung beetle to improve the global search ability and convergence of the algorithm. The proposed new algorithm is named MVMO-LSTM. Compared to traditional intelligent algorithms, the four-quarter averages of the RMSE, MAE and R² of MVMO-LSTM are improved by 0.1147–0.7989 KW, 0.09799–0.6937 KW, and 1.00–13.05%, respectively. The experimental results show that the MVMO-LSTM proposed in this paper not only solves the shortcomings of the DBO but also enhances the stability, global optimization capability and information utilization of the model.