A Probabilistic Method for Planning Collision-free Trajectories of Multiple Mobile Robots

This paper considers the problem of path planning for teams of mobile robots. It presents a decoupled and prioritized approach to coordinate the movements of the mobile robots in their environment. Our algorithm computes the paths for the individual robots in the configuration-time space. Thereby it trades off the distance to both static objects as well as other robots and the length of the path to be traveled. To estimate the risk of colliding with other robots it uses a probabilistic model of the robots motions. The approach has been implemented and tested on real robots as well as in extensive simulation runs. In different experiments we demonstrate that our approach is well suited to control the motions of a team of robots in a typical office environment and illustrate its advantages over other techniques developed so far.