Finding and optimizing solvable priority schemes for decoupled path planning techniques for teams of mobile robots

Coordinating the motion of multiple mobile robots is one of the fundamental problems in robotics. The predominant algorithms for coordinating teams of robots are decoupled and prioritized, thereby avoiding combinatorially hard planning problems typically faced by centralized approaches. While these methods are very efficient, they have two major drawbacks. First, they are incomplete, i.e. they sometimes fail to find a solution even if one exists, and second, the resulting solutions are often not optimal. In this paper, we present a method for finding and optimizing priority schemes for such prioritized and decoupled planning techniques. Existing approaches apply a single priority scheme which makes them overly prone to failure in cases where valid solutions exist. By searching in the space of prioritization schemes, our approach overcomes this limitation. It performs a randomized search with hill-climbing to find solutions and to minimize the overall path length. To focus the search, our algorithm is guided by constraints generated from the task specification. To illustrate the appropriateness of this approach, this paper discusses experimental results obtained with real robots and through systematic robot simulation. The experimental results illustrate the superior performance of our approach, both in terms of efficiency of robot motion and in the ability to find valid plans. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.