On Randomized Searching for Multi-robot Coordination

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel multi-robot coordination method based on a modified RRT algorithm that efficiently finds collision-free trajectories in discrete environments, outperforming some existing algorithms in challenging scenarios.

Contribution

It presents a new multi-robot RRT variant that improves performance and applicability for collision-free path planning in discrete environments.

Findings

Successfully solves problems where Ter Morses algorithm fails.

Produces near-optimal solutions with low computational requirements.

Outperforms existing methods in complex scenarios.

Abstract

In this chapter, we propose a novel approach for solving the coordination of a fleet of mobile robots, which consists of finding a set of collision-free trajectories for individual robots in the fleet. This problem is studied for several decades, and many approaches have been introduced. However, only a small minority is applicable in practice because of their properties - small computational requirement, producing solutions near-optimum, and completeness. The approach we present is based on a multi-robot variant of Rapidly Exploring Random Tree algorithm (RRT) for discrete environments and significantly improves its performance. Although the solutions generated by the approach are slightly worse than one of the best state-of-the-art algorithms presented in [23], it solves problems where ter Morses algorithm fails.