A Continuum Approach to Global Motion Planning for Networked Agents under Limited Communication

Presented is a new method of coordinated global path planning of a group of mobile agents. It is based on a continuum theory for motion of deformable bodies. Considered is a swarm of vehicles at rest in an initial configuration with no restrictions on the initial shape or the locations of the vehicles within that shape. We present a motion plan to move this swarm of vehicles from the initial configuration to a new configuration such that there are no collisions between any vehicles at any time instant. It is achieved via a linear map between the initial and desired final configuration such that the map is invertible at all times.