An Experimental Comparison of Path Planning Techniques for Teams of Mobile Robots

This paper considers the problem of path planning for teams of mobile robots. It investigates two decoupled and prioritized approaches to coordinate the movements of the mobile robots in their environment. The first approach considered is the coordination technique. The second approach is an A -based path planning technique which computes the paths for the individual robots in the configuration time-space. Thereby it trades off the distance to both to static objects as well as to other robots and the length of the path to be traveled. In different experiments carried out with real robots and in simulations we demonstrate that the A -based approach is well suited to control the motions of a team of robots in various environments and illustrate its advantages over the coordination technique.