Coordinated motion planning of multiple mobile robots in formation

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to coordinating a group of mobile robots that move along the designed paths. Subject to the constraints of velocity/acceleration bounds and collision avoidance, the robots are required to maintain the formation relationship while moving. The coordination is realized by posing the coordination problem as a velocity optimization problem in motion planning and then properly planning robots' velocities along the paths. The linear interactive and general optimizer (lingo) is utilized to achieve the velocity optimization goal. Simulations are performed on a group of mobile robots to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in coordinated motion planning with the formation requirement.