Real-time navigation for multiple mobile robots in a dynamic environment

This paper proposes a practicable navigation method for multiple mobile robots in a dynamic environment. In the past, many navigation methods have been developed. However, these methods were often limited to single robot, or robots with special mobility such as holonomic ones. From the viewpoint of practical applications, it is indispensable that the number of robots, shape and mobility of robots are arbitrary. In this study a deadlock-free navigation for non-holonomic mobile robots in a dynamic environment is given. In the proposed scheme, the information of the environment and robots are fed back to the system in real-time, and global path planning is cyclically executed. The proposed system can be applied to dynamic environment and a reliable deadlockfree navigation of multiple robots. The real-time on-line path planning is performed by an efficient A* search in configuration spaces representing the robots and environment. The proposed method is tested by some kind of simulations for typical complicated navigation situations. As a result, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified.