학술논문

Near-Optimal Multi-Robot Motion Planning with Finite Sampling
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Robotics IEEE Trans. Robot. Robotics, IEEE Transactions on. 39(5):3422-3436 Oct, 2023
Subject
Robotics and Control Systems
Computing and Processing
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Planning
Robot kinematics
Trajectory
Standards
Multi-robot systems
Collision avoidance
Tires
Motion planning
multi-robot systems
multi-agent systems
sampling methods
Language
ISSN
1552-3098
1941-0468
Abstract
An underlying structure in several sampling-based methods for continuous multirobot motion planning (MRMP) is the tensor roadmap , which emerges from combining multiple probabilistic roadmap (PRM) graphs constructed for the individual robots via a tensor product. We study the conditions under which the tensor roadmap encodes a near-optimal solution for MRMP—satisfying these conditions implies near optimality for a variety of popular planners, including dRRT*, and the discrete methods M* and conflict-based search, when applied to the continuous domain. We develop the first finite-sample analysis of this kind, which specifies the number of samples, their deterministic distribution, and magnitude of the connection radii that should be used by each individual PRM graph, to guarantee near-optimality using the tensor roadmap. This significantly improves upon a previous asymptotic analysis, wherein the number of samples tends to infinity. Our new finite sample-size analysis supports guaranteed high-quality solutions in practice within finite time. To achieve our new result, we first develop a sampling scheme, which we call the staggered grid , for finite-sample motion planning for individual robots, which requires significantly fewer samples than previous work. We then extend it to the much more involved MRMP setting, which requires to account for interactions among multiple robots. Finally, we report on a few experiments that serve as a verification of our theoretical findings and raise interesting questions for further investigation.