Smooth Coordination and Navigation for Multiple Differential-Drive Robots

Abstract

Multiple independent robots sharing the workspace need to be able to navigate to their goals while avoiding collisions with each other. We describe and evaluate two algorithms for smooth and collision-free navigation for multiple independent differential-drive robots. We extend reciprocal collision avoidance algorithms based on velocity obstacles and on acceleration-velocity obstacles. We implement both methods on multiple iRobot Create differential-drive robots, and report on the quality and ability of the robots using the two algorithms to navigate to their goals in a smooth and collision-free manner.

Keywords

Path planning for multiple mobile robots or agents; collision avoidance.

Paper

Jamie Snape, Stephen J. Guy, Jur van den Berg, and Dinesh Manocha, "Smooth coordination and navigation for multiple differential-drive robots," Experimental Robotics: the 12th International Symposium ISER, Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol. 79, 2012.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by ARO under Contract W911NF-04-1-0088, by NSF under Award 0636208, Award 0917040, and Award 0904990, by DARPA and RDECOM under Contract WR91CRB-08-C-0137, and by Intel.

Related Work

• Jamie Snape, Jur van den Berg, Stephen J. Guy, and Dinesh Manocha, "The hybrid reciprocal velocity obstacle," IEEE Trans. Robot., vol. 27, 2011.
• Jur van den Berg, Stephen J. Guy, Ming Lin, and Dinesh Manocha, "Reciprocal n-body collision avoidance," Robotics Research: the 14th International Symposium ISRR, Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, 2011.