A Path-Planning Method for Wall Surface Inspection Robot Based on Improved Genetic Algorithm

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors present in this paper a method for path-planning in which they manage to combine the lack of GPS signal with physical barrier.

Even though the idea is interesting, the paper lacks important information and results in order to be accepted for publication in this journal.

Bellow, are presented just a few important points that has to be modified:

• Lines 72-93 – font is different that the rest of the paper
• There are some minor typos – for eg. Line 172 (extra space “the path   includes”). Line 308 ((x,y).in the GPS -> (x,y). In the GPS
• Line 245 – the name of the subsection 3.2.1
• Lines 247-277 – I consider that the authors should use italic fonts for each category (Initialization, Fitness Calculation, etc.). It would be more easily for the readers to follow the idea
• Figure 6 – improve the quality of the figure.
• Lines 336-339 – the authors state that the crossover and mutation must be high in order to obtain convergence. Please explain in more detail this aspect
• Equation 12 is duplicated; The equation between lines 345-346 should be about improving crossover
• Line 363 – are you sure that is Figure 7?
• Line 370 – I think that this has to be figure 8
• Explain why did you use different number of points for figure from line 370 (simple vs complex environment). You should use the same number of points so that the readers can easily understand the differences. Or explain in detail why you pick different points number
• Table 2 – why there is a different size of the population in the comparison of the IPSOGA and GA? How can someone understand the benefit of your proposed algorithm if the population size of the GA is 40 times higher than IPSOGA’s population
• Line 381 – “black curves” -> in Figures 8,9 and 10 there is no black curve
• Lines 380-389 – explain in more details the conclusions
• Figure 8 and Figure 9 has the same name
• Figure 9 and Figure 10 has the same “graph”
• Figure 11 + Figure 12 – use the same legend lines in both of them – it will be more easily to follow the results;
• Figure 11 + Figure 12 – avoid dashed and dotted lines – they are hard to follow – use different colors
• Please rephrase the text between lines 408-410
• Table 4 – add the results for all the 30-path-planning experiments
• The authors stated in Figure from line 370 that they generated 2 environments (simple and complex), but the results presented from line 371 until line 431 or just from the simple environment. The authors should also add the results from the complex environment
• In Conclusion section the authors should add a subsection regarding research challenges; what is the computational power used for the experiment and what is the energy consumption?

Author Response

Dear Editors and Reviewers:

 

Thanks very much for taking your time to review this manuscript.

 

We are very glad to receive the feedback and review comments on the manuscript entitled “A path-planning method for wall surface inspection robot based on Improved Genetic algorithm”. We agree with the opinions and suggestions of the review experts. We have made changes one by one according to the expert's modification opinions. All the changes are highlighted using the track changes function in MS word. We explained how to make the changes one by one. Please refer to the latest uploaded manuscript. We also have proofread again for typos and asked a native English speaker to polish the English writing. This revision should be free of typos and awkward grammatical phrasing.

 

We deeply appreciate your consideration of our manuscript. If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact me at the address below.

 

Thank you and best regards.

 

Yours sincerely,

 

Yong Tao

Corresponding author:

Name: Yong Tao

E-mail: [email protected]

 

 

Response to Reviewer 1 Comments

Reviewer # 1:

Thanks for your carefully reading. We have corrected the formatting errors based on your valuable comments. We have also added experiments and edited the content of the article according to your advice.

Specific comments:

1. “Lines 336-339 – the authors state that the crossover and mutation must be high in order to obtain convergence. Please explain in more detail this aspect”.”

Response: Thanks for pointing this out. What we want to say here is “the crossover and mutation probabilities should be higher in the early stage to improve global search capabilities, while lower in the last stage so as to ensure overall convergence”. We have revised sentence in the manuscript and the changes can be seen at lines339-341.

2. “Explain why did you use different number of points for figure from line 370 (simple vs complex environment). You should use the same number of points so that the readers can easily understand the differences. Or explain in detail why you pick different points number”

Response: Thank you for the important comments. According to your suggestions, we re-ran the path planning experiment in a complex environment. The result can be seen in Figure8(line 370). 

3. “Table 2 – why there is a different size of the population in the comparison of the IPSOGA and GA? How can someone understand the benefit of your proposed algorithm if the population size of the GA is 40 times higher than IPSOGA’s population”

Response: Thank you for the important comments. We have revised the related content. The population size of proposed method we used in the experiment is 500 but not 50. It a mistake when writing the article and have been corrected. 500 is a quarter of 2000. It means that our method just uses a more smaller population size to get a better path, which may improve computing efficiency in actual tasks. We consider it is an advantage of the algorithm. 

4. “The authors stated in Figure from line 370 that they generated 2 environments (simple and complex), but the results presented from line 371 until line 431 or just from the simple environment. The authors should also add the results from the complex environment.”

Response: Thank you for the important comments. We conducted experiments in complex environments and add the results to the experiment part of our manuscript. The changes can be seen in simulation experiment section. 

5. “In Conclusion section the authors should add a subsection regarding research challenges; what is the computational power used for the experiment and what is the energy consumption?”

Response: Thanks for the important comments. We have revised the Conclusion section. We add the description of research challenges and what we want to do in the future. The computational power we used was is also described in this section.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

You need to add a new section Results and discussion and provide a discussion about how your proposed approach is better as compared to the existing approaches.

You need to add a few new related works 

Author Response

Dear Editors and Reviewers:

 

Thanks very much for taking your time to review this manuscript.

 

We are very glad to receive the feedback and review comments on the manuscript entitled “A path-planning method for wall surface inspection robot based on Improved Genetic algorithm”. We agree with the opinions and suggestions of the review experts. We have made changes one by one according to the expert's modification opinions. All the changes are highlighted using the track changes function in MS word. We explained how to make the changes one by one. Please refer to the latest uploaded manuscript. We also have proofread again for typos and asked a native English speaker to polish the English writing. This revision should be free of typos and awkward grammatical phrasing.

 

We deeply appreciate your consideration of our manuscript. If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact me at the address below.

 

Thank you and best regards.

 

Yours sincerely,

 

Yong Tao

Corresponding author:

Name: Yong Tao

E-mail: [email protected]

 

 

Response to Reviewer 2 Comments

Reviewer # 2:

Thanks for your important comment.

Specific comments:

1. “You need to add a new section Results and discussion and provide a discussion about how your proposed approach is better as compared to the existing approaches.”

Response: Thank you for the important comments. We conducted experiments in complex environments according to your valuable suggestion. The results were added to the experiment part of our manuscript. We increase more explanation about the result. The discussion has been carefully revised to make sure conduct a thorough comparison with existing approaches, which was also been highlighted in the conclusion section.

2. “You need to add a few new related works”

Response: Thanks for pointing this out. We have updated our references so as to focus more on new related works. The changes can be found in the reference section.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Great work!

The authors managed to answer all my concerns

Author Response

Dear Reviewers，

Thanks very much for taking your time to review this manuscript.

We are very glad to receive the feedback and review comments on the manuscript entitled “A path-planning method for wall surface inspection robot based on Improved Genetic algorithm”. We agree with the opinions and suggestions of the review experts. We have made changes one by one according to the expert's modification opinions. All the changes are highlighted using the track changes function in MS word. We explained how to make the changes one by one. Please refer to the latest uploaded manuscript. We also have proofread again for typos and asked a native English speaker to polish the English writing. This revision should be free of typos and awkward grammatical phrasing.

We deeply appreciate your consideration of our manuscript. If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact me at the address below.

Thank you and best regards.

 

Yours sincerely,

Yong Tao

Corresponding author:

Name: Yong Tao

E-mail: [email protected]

 

Response to Reviewer Comments

Reviewer # 1:

Thanks for your important suggestion. We have adjusted the content of the article according to your comments.

Reviewer 2 Report

Please add a Related work section and discuss state of the art work

Author Response

Dear Reviewers,

Thanks very much for taking your time to review this manuscript.

We are very glad to receive the feedback and review comments on the manuscript entitled “A path-planning method for wall surface inspection robot based on Improved Genetic algorithm”. We agree with the opinions and suggestions of the review experts. We have made changes one by one according to the expert's modification opinions. All the changes are highlighted using the track changes function in MS word. We explained how to make the changes one by one. Please refer to the latest uploaded manuscript. We also have proofread again for typos and asked a native English speaker to polish the English writing. This revision should be free of typos and awkward grammatical phrasing.

We deeply appreciate your consideration of our manuscript. If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact me at the address below.

Thank you and best regards.

 

Yours sincerely,

Yong Tao

Corresponding author:

Name: Yong Tao

E-mail: [email protected]

 

Response to Reviewer Comments

Reviewer # 1:

Thanks for your important suggestion. We have adjusted the content of the article according to your comments. Related work is stripped from the introduction section into separate paragraphs. We have added some depiction at the same time. All the change can be seen in the Related work section (line86-126).

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf