ARMO: Adaptive road map optimization for large robot teams

Abstract

Autonomous robot teams that simultaneously dispatch transportation tasks are playing more and more an important role in present logistic centers and manufacturing plants. In this paper we consider the problem of robot motion planning for large robot teams in the industrial domain. We present adaptive road map optimization (ARMO) that is capable of adapting the road map whenever the environment has changed. Based on linear programming, ARMO computes an optimal road map configuration according to environmental constraints (including human whereabouts) and the demand for transportation tasks from loading stations in the plant. For detecting dynamic changes, the environment is described by a grid map augmented with a hidden Markov model (HMM). We show experimentally that ARMO outperforms decoupled planning in terms of computation time and time needed for task completion.