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Road defect detection is a crucial task for promptly repairing road damage and ensuring road safety. Traditional manual detection methods are inefficient and costly. To overcome this issue, we propose an enhanced road defect detection algorithm called BL-YOLOv8, which is based on YOLOv8s. In this study, we optimized the YOLOv8s model by reconstructing its neck structure through the integration of the BiFPN concept. This optimization reduces the model's parameters, computational load, and overall size. Furthermore, to enhance the model's operation, we optimized the feature pyramid layer by introducing the SimSPPF module, which improves its speed. Moreover, we introduced LSK-attention, a dynamic large convolutional kernel attention mechanism, to expand the model's receptive field and enhance the accuracy of object detection. Finally, we compared the enhanced YOLOv8 model with other existing models to validate the effectiveness of our proposed improvements. The experimental results confirmed the effective recognition of road defects by the improved YOLOv8 algorithm. In comparison to the original model, an improvement of 3.3% in average precision mAP@0.5 was observed. Moreover, a reduction of 29.92% in parameter volume and a decrease of 11.45% in computational load were achieved. This proposed approach can serve as a valuable reference for the development of automatic road defect detection methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposed an improved Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) to resolve the problem of instability and convergence accuracy when GWO is used as a meta-heuristic algorithm with strong optimal search capability in the path planning for mobile robots. We improved chaotic tent mapping to initialize the wolves to enhance the global search ability and used a nonlinear convergence factor based on the Gaussian distribution change curve to balance the global and local searchability. In addition, an improved dynamic proportional weighting strategy is proposed that can update the positions of grey wolves so that the convergence of this algorithm can be accelerated. The proposed improved GWO algorithm results are compared with the other eight algorithms through several benchmark function test experiments and path planning experiments. The experimental results show that the improved GWO has higher accuracy and faster convergence speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]