Time-optimal Coordination of Mobile Robots along Specified Paths
This work addresses coordination challenges for mobile robots in applications like logistics or manufacturing, offering an incremental improvement over prior methods by enabling exact linear modeling of dynamics.
The paper tackles the problem of time-optimal coordination of mobile robots with kinodynamic constraints along specified paths, proposing a novel MILP-based approach that yields resolution-optimal solutions and allows exact linear modeling of second-order dynamics, as demonstrated through extensive simulations.
In this paper, we address the problem of time-optimal coordination of mobile robots under kinodynamic constraints along specified paths. We propose a novel approach based on time discretization that leads to a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation. This problem can be solved using general-purpose MILP solvers in a reasonable time, resulting in a resolution-optimal solution. Moreover, unlike previous work found in the literature, our formulation allows an exact linear modeling (up to the discretization resolution) of second-order dynamic constraints. Extensive simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.