Multi-Robot Coordinated Planning in Confined Environments under Kinematic Constraints

We investigate the problem of multi-robot coordinated planning in environments where the robots may have to operate in close proximity to each other. We seek computationally efficient planners that ensure safe paths and adherence to kinematic constraints. We extend the central planner dRRT* with our variant, fast-dRRT (fdRRT), with the intention being to use in tight environments that lead to a high degree of coupling between robots. Our algorithm is empirically shown to achieve the trade-off between computational time and solution quality, especially in tight environments. We also demonstrate the ability of our algorithm to be adapted to the online planning problem while maintaining computational efficiency. The software implementation is available online at https://github.com/CMangette/Fast-dRRT.