Kavraki Lab

Physical and Biological Computing

Keywords:

Abstract:

This paper considers the problem of coordinating
multiple vehicles with kinodynamic constraints that
operate in the same partially-known environment. The
vehicles are able to communicate within limited range.
Their objective is to avoid collisions between them and
with the obstacles, while the vehicles move towards
their goals. An important issue of real-time planning
for systems with bounded acceleration is that
inevitable collision states must also be avoided. The
focus of this paper is to guarantee safety despite the
dynamic constraints with a decentralized motion
planning technique that employs only local
information. We propose a coordination framework that
allows vehicles to generate and select compatible sets
of valid trajectories and prove that this scheme
guarantees collision-avoidance in the specified
setup. The theoretical results have been also
experimentally confirmed with a distributed simulator
where each vehicle replans online with a
sampling-based, kinodynamic motion planner and uses
message-passing to communicate with neighboring
agents.