Graphbots: cooperative motion planning in discrete spaces

Most previous theoretical work on motion planning for a group of robots has addressed the problem of path planning for the individual robots sequentially, in geometrically simple regions of Euclidean space (e.g., a planar region containing polygonal obstacles). In this paper, we define a version of the motionplanning problem in which the robots move simultaneously. We establish conditions under which a team of robots having a particular configuration can move from any start location to any goal destination in a graph-structured space. We show that for a group of robots that maintain a fixed formation we can find the “shortest” path in polynomial time, and we give faster algorithms for special kinds of environments.