A new multi-robot path planning algorithm: Dynamic distributed particle swarm optimization

Abstract

Multiple Robot Systems (MRS) has become a major study concern in the field of robotic research. Their control becomes unreliable and even infeasible if the number of robots increases. In this paper, a new dynamic distributed particle swarm optimization (D <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> PSO) algorithm is proposed for trajectory path planning of multi-robots in order to find collision free optimal path for each robot in the environment. The proposed approach consists in calculating two local optima detectors, LOD <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">pBest</sub> and LOD <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">gBest</sub> . Particles which are unable to improve their personal best and global best for predefined number of successive iterations would be replaced with restructured ones. Stagnation and local optima problems would be avoided by adding diversity to the population, without losing the fast convergence characteristic of PSO. Experiments with multiple robots are provided and proved effectiveness of such approach compared with the distributed PSO.