Abstract
In this paper, we present a formal approach to reciprocal n-body collision avoidance, where multiple mobile robots need to avoid collisions with each other while moving in a common workspace. In our formulation, each robot acts fully independently, and does not communicate with other robots. Based on the definition of velocity obstacles [5], we derive sufficient conditions for collision-free motion by reducing the problem to solving a low-dimensional linear program. We test our approach on several dense and complex simulation scenarios involving thousands of robots and compute collision-free actions for all of them in only a few milliseconds. To the best of our knowledge, this method is the first that can guarantee local collision-free motion for a large number of robots in a cluttered workspace.
This research is supported in part by ARO Contracts W911NF-04-1-0088, NSF award 0636208, DARPA/RDECOM Contracts N61339-04-C-0043 and WR91CRB-08-C-0137, Intel, and Microsoft.
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van den Berg, J., Guy, S.J., Lin, M., Manocha, D. (2011). Reciprocal n-Body Collision Avoidance. In: Pradalier, C., Siegwart, R., Hirzinger, G. (eds) Robotics Research. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol 70. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19457-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19457-3_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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