Integrated Motion Planning, Coordination and Control for Fleets of Mobile Robots

ICAPS 2018 tutorial

Federico Pecora, Masoumeh Mansouri

Center for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems, Örebro University

Contact: <name.surname>@oru.se

Slides: available in this repository

Deploying fleets of autonomous robots in real-world applications requires addressing three problems: motion planning, coordination, and control. These three problems are intrinsically dependent: robot motions must be physically realized by robot controllers, and must also be coordinated in order to avoid collisions and deadlocks. Real-world applications often pose further requirements that narrow down the range of methods that can be used: different motion planners are applicable in different environments and for different types of robots, and robot controllers are often certified black boxes that ship with the robot platform and cannot be modified.

The tutorial will overview methods for integrated motion planning, coordination and control developed at the Center for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems. We will illustrate how trajectory envelopes (that is, spatio-temporal constraints on robot motions) can be used to realize a high-level control scheme in which motion planning and coordination are performed on-line. The presented methods will be illustrated with live demos with simulated robots inspired by industrial use cases, using open source implementations of the trajectory envelope representation (http://metacsp.org) and of the coordination algorithms (https://github.com/FedericoPecora/coordination_oru).