Title
dRRT*: Scalable and Informed Asymptotically-Optimal Multi-Robot Motion Planning.
Abstract
Many exciting robotic applications require multiple robots with many degrees of freedom, such as manipulators, to coordinate their motion in a shared workspace. Discovering high-quality paths in such scenarios can be achieved, in principle, by exploring the composite space of all robots. Sampling-based planners do so by building a roadmap or a tree data structure in the corresponding configuration space and can achieve asymptotic optimality. The hardness of motion planning, however, renders the explicit construction of such structures in the composite space of multiple robots impractical. This work proposes a scalable solution for such coupled multi-robot problems, which provides desirable path-quality guarantees and is also computationally efficient. In particular, the proposed $$\mathtt{dRRT^*}$$ is an informed, asymptotically-optimal extension of a prior sampling-based multi-robot motion planner, $$\mathtt{dRRT}$$. The prior approach introduced the idea of building roadmaps for each robot and implicitly searching the tensor product of these structures in the composite space. This work identifies the conditions for convergence to optimal paths in multi-robot problems, which the prior method was not achieving. Building on this analysis, $$\mathtt{dRRT}$$ is first properly adapted so as to achieve the theoretical guarantees and then further extended so as to make use of effective heuristics when searching the composite space of all robots. The case where the various robots share some degrees of freedom is also studied. Evaluation in simulation indicates that the new algorithm, $$\mathtt{dRRT^*}$$  converges to high-quality paths quickly and scales to a higher number of robots where various alternatives fail. This work also demonstrates the planner’s capability to solve problems involving multiple real-world robotic arms.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1007/s10514-019-09832-9
Autonomous Robots
Keywords
Field
DocType
Multi-robot motion planning, Multi-robot problems, Motion planning, Asymptotic optimality, Sampling-based motion planning, Multi-arm motion planning
Motion planning,Robotic arm,Mathematical optimization,Computer science,Workspace,Simulation,Tree (data structure),Heuristics,Robot,Configuration space,Scalability
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
44
3
0929-5593
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.36
27
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rahul Shome1346.07
Kiril Solovey27110.30
Andrew Dobson310.70
Dan Halperin41291105.20
Kostas E. Bekris593899.49