Path Planning with Kinematic Constraints for Robot Groups

TL;DR

This paper introduces a path planning method for robot groups that incorporates kinematic constraints and safety distances, ensuring feasible and safe navigation in complex environments.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach that considers kinematic constraints in multi-robot path planning, bridging the gap between theoretical planning and real-world robot motion.

Findings

Successfully implemented in simulation and real robots

Maintains minimum safety distance between robots

Handles 2D and 3D environments effectively

Abstract

Path planning for multiple robots is well studied in the AI and robotics communities. For a given discretized environment, robots need to find collision-free paths to a set of specified goal locations. Robots can be fully anonymous, non-anonymous, or organized in groups. Although powerful solvers for this abstract problem exist, they make simplifying assumptions by ignoring kinematic constraints, making it difficult to use the resulting plans on actual robots. In this paper, we present a solution which takes kinematic constraints, such as maximum velocities, into account, while guaranteeing a user-specified minimum safety distance between robots. We demonstrate our approach in simulation and on real robots in 2D and 3D environments.