Cooperative Path Planning For Multiple Mobile Robots In Complex Environment

The cooperative path planning of multiple mobile robots is a challenging problem in robot navigation.In complicated environment,this kind of cooperative path planning needs to determine an optimal path from the starting point to the target point for each robot under the constraint of no collision among the paths for all robots.Therefore,how to avoid the collision between robots and potential obstacles is the key to this problem.Most current researches focus on path planning of single robot in static environment.The problem of collaborative path planning of multiple mobile robots in complex environment is still an open problem to be solved.The main work is listed as follows:1)For the global path planning of single robot,the constraint satisfaction method is used to construct the mathematical optimization model,and an improved ant colony algorithm is proposed based on the model.To guide the robot walk along the shortest path,a new heuristic function is designed based on the angle between the local path direction of the current node and the Euclidean path direction from the starting point to the end point.An obstacle avoidance rule related to the number of optional nodes is proposed to avoid the obstacles in static environment.And the length of path is employed to update the pheromone in order to further enhance the convergence of the algorithm.Experiments show that the performance of the improved ant colony algorithm is better than the original.2)For the path planning of multiple mobile robots in static environment,a mathematical model with multi-objective of short path length and low pause time is constructed.Given the potential collisions between robots,heuristic rules are studied to solve this problem.Based on the global path planning of single robot,a two-stage programming algorithm based on global path planning and local path adjustment with heuristic rules is developed.Simulation experiments show the effectiveness of the algorithm.3)For the path planning of multiple mobile robots in dynamic environment,the obstacle avoidance method is proposed according to the motion properties of dynamic obstacles,and hence the collision between robots and dynamic obstacles is eliminated.The simulation experiments are designed and the results show the effectiveness of the method.4)Taking the needs of enterprises into account,a cooperative path planning system for multiple mobile robots is designed.The system provides interactive modules such as user login,user management,single robot scheduling scheme and multi-robot scheduling scheme to meet the needs of users in different operating environments.