Time enhanced A*: Towards the development of a new approach for Multi-Robot Coordination

In this paper the authors focus on presenting a new path planning approach for a multi-robot transportation system in an industrial case scenario. The proposed method is based on the A∗ heuristic search in a cell decomposition scenario, for which a time component was added — Time Enhanced A∗ or simply TEA∗. To access the flexibility and efficiency of the proposed algorithm, a set of experiments were performed in a simulated industrial environment. During trials execution the proposed algorithm has shown high capability on preventing/dealing with the occurrence of deadlocks in the transportation system.