Paper Info
Title
Path Planning and scheduling for a fleet of autonomous vehicles
Abstract
This paper presents a new solution approach for managing the motion of a fleet of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in indoor factory environments. AVs are requested to serve a number of workstations (WS) (following a specified desired production plan for materials requirements) while taking into account the safe movement (collisions avoidance) in the shop floor as well as time duration and energy resources. The proposed approach is based on the Bump-Surface concept to represent the 2D environment through a single mathematical entity. The solution of the combined problem of path planning and task scheduling is searched on a higher-dimension B-surface (in our case 3D) in such a way that its inverse image into the robot environment satisfies the given objectives and constraints. Then, a modified Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to search for a near-optimum solution. The objective of the fleet coordination consists of determining the best feasible paths for the AVs so that all the WS are served at the lowest possible cost. The efficiency of the developed method is investigated and discussed through characteristic simulated experiments concerning a variety of operating environments.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1017/S0263574714002872
ROBOTICA
Keywords
Field
DocType
Conflicts-free,Path planning,Motion planning,Logistics,Service robots
Motion planning,Factory,Scheduling (computing),Workstation,Control engineering,Engineering,Robot,Energy resources,Genetic algorithm
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
34
10
0263-5747
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.46
9
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Elias k. Xidias1537.16
Paraskevi Th. Zacharia2212.15
Andreas C. Nearchou317314.97