Coordinated motion planning of multiple mobile robots in formation

This paper presents an approach to coordinating a group of mobile robots that move along the designed paths. Subject to the constraints of velocity/acceleration bounds and collision avoidance, the robots are required to maintain the formation relationship while moving. The coordination is realized by posing the coordination problem as a velocity optimization problem in motion planning and then properly planning robots´ velocities along the paths. The linear interactive and general optimizer (lingo) is utilized to achieve the velocity optimization goal. Simulations are performed on a group of mobile robots to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in coordinated motion planning with the formation requirement.