Multi-Robot Motion Planning by Incremental Coordination

Abstract

In a recent study, it was shown that high failure rates in decoupled multi-robot motion planning makes the decoupled planning approach an unsuitable choice, in comparison to the centralized approach, in many practical instances. Motivated by this study, we devised a new multi-robot planning strategy in which we partially merge the two stages of the basic decoupled planning approach. Our experimental results show that this new strategy significantly improves upon the reliability of the decoupled planning approach. Overall in our tests, the new strategy outperforms both the centralized and decoupled planning approach, indicating that in practice it can be a better choice, than both the centralized and decoupled approach, for solving multi-robot planning problems