When Slime Mould Grows a Memory: A Flow Accumulating Slime Mould Planner for Multigoal Robot Path Planning

Multi-waypoint path planning for autonomous robots remains a challenging optimization problem, as traditional methods often struggle with scalability. Inspired by the network formation of Physarum polycephalum, the Slime Mould-based MultiWaypoint Planner (SMMWP), a novel nature-inspired algorithm, is introduced. The navigation task is formulated as a Travelling Salesman Problem. To address this, the standard Slime Mould Algorithm (SMA) is enhanced through two distinct mechanisms. First, priority