A lattice-based approach to multi-robot motion planning for non-holonomic vehicles

Coordinating fleets of autonomous, non-holonomic vehicles is paramount to many industrial applications. While there exists solutions to efficiently calculate trajectories for individual vehicles, an effective methodology to coordinate their motions and to avoid deadlocks is still missing. Decoupled approaches, where motions are calculated independently for each vehicle and then centrally coordinated for execution, have the means to identify deadlocks, but not to solve all of them. We present a novel approach that overcomes this limitation and that can be used to complement the deficiencies of decoupled solutions with centralized coordination. Here, we formally define an extension of the framework of lattice-based motion planning to multi-robot systems and we validate it experimentally. Our approach can jointly plan for multiple vehicles and it generates kinematically feasible and deadlock-free motions.