# Sequential path planning for a formation of mobile robots with split and merge

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a deterministic, graph-based path planning algorithm for robot formations that handles splitting and merging, suitable for complex environments and scalable to tens of robots.

## Contribution

It presents a novel, efficient extension of Dijkstra's algorithm for formation path planning with split and merge capabilities.

## Key findings

- Algorithm is deterministic and complete.
- Works efficiently in complex environments.
- Scales to formations of tens of robots.

## Abstract

An algorithm for robot formation path planning is presented in this paper. Given a map of the working environment, the algorithm finds a path for a formation taking into account possible split of the formation and its consecutive merge. The key part of the solution works on a graph and sequentially employs an extended version of Dijkstra's graph-based algorithm for multiple robots. It is thus deterministic, complete, computationally inexpensive, and finds a solution for a fixed source node to another node in the graph. Moreover, the presented solution is general enough to be incorporated into high-level tasks like cooperative surveillance and it can benefit from state-of-the-art formation motion planning approaches, which can be used for evaluation of edges of an input graph. The performed experimental results demonstrate the behavior of the method in complex environments for formations consisting of tens of robots.