Collaborative motion planning of autonomous robots

In disaster areas, office buildings, or at home, multiple autonomous networked mobile robots may act instead of human beings. These robots have to move to their destiantion so as to perform their function. For this purpose they need to be able to recognize the changes in the surrounding environment. They are equipped with a motion-planning method in order to avoid in real time collisions with other robots or obtacles. In this paper we propose a motion planning method based on PRM (Probabilistic Roadmap) algorithm. To evaluate our method, we constructed an experiment platform based on StarBED, which is a large-scale network testbed. By using the virtual environment manager Map Manager, the WLAN emulator QOMET, and the experiment-support software RUNE we are able to perform emulation of large-scale autonomous networked mobile robot systems. The experimental results confirm the usefulness of collaborative motion planning, which results in reaching faster the estimation and in less frequent re-planning.