학술논문

Velocity Obstacle for Polytopic Collision Avoidance for Distributed Multi-Robot Systems
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett. Robotics and Automation Letters, IEEE. 8(6):3502-3509 Jun, 2023
Subject
Robotics and Control Systems
Computing and Processing
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Collision avoidance
Robot kinematics
Navigation
Multi-robot systems
Shape
Robot sensing systems
Real-time systems
Distributed robot systems
collision avoidance
multi-robot systems
Language
ISSN
2377-3766
2377-3774
Abstract
Obstacle avoidance for multi-robot navigation with polytopic shapes is challenging. Existing works simplify the system dynamics or consider it as a convex or non-convex optimization problem with positive distance constraints between robots, which limits real-time performance and scalability. Additionally, generating collision-free behavior for polytopic-shaped robots is harder due to implicit and non-differentiable distance functions between polytopes. In this letter, we extend the concept of velocity obstacle (VO) principle for polytopic-shaped robots and propose a novel approach to construct the VO in the function of vertex coordinates and other robot's states. Compared with existing work about obstacle avoidance between polytopic-shaped robots, our approach is much more computationally efficient as the proposed approach for construction of VO between polytopes is optimization-free. Based on VO representation for polytopic shapes, we later propose a navigation approach for distributed multi-robot systems. We validate our proposed VO representation and navigation approach in multiple challenging scenarios including large-scale randomized tests, and our approach outperforms the state of art in many evaluation metrics, including completion rate, deadlock rate, and the average travel distance.