Movement coordination for single‐track robot systems

Abstract

Abstract We consider problems associated with the coordination of movement within a multiple‐robot system in which all motion is restricted to a single track. Our objective is to minimize the reconfiguration time, that is, the total time required to move a collection of robots from an initial to a goal configuration. We show that various models give rise to a wide range of problem complexities. For these problems we design and analyze optimization and approximation strategies.