Motion Planning which Produces a Give-way Behavior using Spatiotemporal RRT

Abstract

It is expected that more and more robots will be introduced into public societies and homes. The problem in such a case will be the smooth mobility of each robot. Collision avoidance between robots or between a robot and other obstacles including human beings is important as well as reaching its target point in order to carry out its task. Human beings often give way to each other to cope with this collision avoidance problem in a decentralized manner in which they plan and move individually without mutually exchanging information. This paper demonstrates that the robot can produce giving way to each other behavior similar to human beings based on a decentralized approach. Spatiotemporal RRT, which is an extended version of Rapidly exploring Random Trees (RRT) that is a random sampling method for searching a large working space effectively, is used in order to produce this behavior. This paper also presents three typical types of environments that require giving way to each other and explains the result of numerical simulation with the proposed method.