A collision checker for car-like robots coordination

Abstract

The paper presents a geometric algorithm dealing with collision checking in the framework of multiple mobile robot coordination. We consider that several mobile robots have planned their own collision-free path by taking into account the obstacles, but ignoring the presence of other robots. We first compute the domain swept by each robot when moving along its path - such a domain is called a trace. Then the algorithm computes the coordination configurations for one robot with respect to the others, i.e. the configurations along the path where the robot enters the traces of the other robots or exits from them. This information may be exploited to coordinate the motions of all the robots.