Multi-Path Planning for Autonomous Navigation of Multiple Robots in a Shared Workspace with Humans

Path finding for multiple robots is one of most important problems in robotics when to find a way to move robots from their starting positions to reach their respective goals without collisions. However, in the case of a complex environment with the presence of humans and other unpredictable moving objects, fixing a single path to the goal may lead to a situation where there are a lot of obstacles on the planned path and the robots may fail to realise the moving plan. To address this issue, a new approach of using multiple path planning where each robot has different options to choose its path to the goal is introduced in this paper. The information about planned moving paths are shared among the robots in the working domain, combined with obstacle avoidance constraints in local ranges, and formulated as an optimisation problem. Solution of the problem leads to the optimal moving plans of robots. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by experimental results.