Pareto-optimal coordination of multiple robots with safety guarantees

This paper investigates the coordination of multiple robots with pre-specified paths, considering motion safety and minimizing the traveling time. A method to estimate possible collision point along the local paths of the robots is proposed. The repulsive potential energy is computed based on the distances between the robots and the potential collision points. This repulsive potential energy is used as the cost map of the probabilistic roadmap (PRM), which is constructed in the coordination space for multiple robots taking into account both motion time cost and safety cost. We propose a search method on the PRM to obtain the Pareto-optimal coordination solution for multiple robots. Both simulation and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithms.