On Randomized Searching for Multi-robot Coordination
This work addresses coordination for mobile robot fleets, offering a practical approach with small computational requirements, but it is incremental as it builds on existing RRT methods.
The authors tackled the problem of coordinating multiple mobile robots by finding collision-free trajectories, proposing a multi-robot variant of the Rapidly Exploring Random Tree (RRT) algorithm that improves performance and solves problems where a state-of-the-art method fails, though solutions are slightly worse.
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.