Motion planning and coordination of multi-agent systems

Abstract

Development of a navigation scheme for a group of cooperative mobile robots is attempted in this paper. Potential field method is used to generate collision-free movement of a robot while it encounters other robots as obstacles. Finally, a cooperation scheme is proposed based on human behaviour to optimise motion strategies of robots treating each other as their obstacles. Computer simulations have been conducted for three different cases with four, eight and 12 robots negotiating a common dynamic environment. In each case, 100 different scenarios are considered and travelling times of all the robots are computed separately. The scenes in which the robots meeting collision is treated as a failure scenario and travelling time is not calculated. Performance of cooperation scheme has improved with the increase in a number of robots.