Motion Planning of Multiple Mobile Robots for Cooperative Sweeping.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an off-line planning algorithm for cooperative sweeping of multiple mobile robots. Sweeping of a whole work area is fundamental and essential task of mobile robots. For efficient cooperation, setting appropriate burden onto each robot is very important because interference of robots and overlaps of their sweeping units make efficiency low. In proposed algorithm, sweeping cost is evaluated by means of length of paths on which robot should move. We introduce both edges of the configuration space and Voronoi diagram so as to compute paths in the whole area. We generate a tour for traversing all the paths by applying the algorithm of the Chinese Postman Problem. According to the cost evaluation, appropriate paths of the tour are assigned to each robot. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is verified by simulations.