Autonomous Multi-vehicle Formations for Cooperative Airfield Snow Shoveling

In this paper an approach for snow shoveling of airfields using formations of snowploughs is introduced. The vehicle formations split and reunite depending on the varying width of the roads to clean. An optimal schedule is derived for the vehicles guaranteeing complete coverage of the graph which is used to model the airfield. Based on the schedule a simple path is generated for the formation centers. Even during turns the generated motion for the car-like robots within the formation ensures proper breadthways coverage. Finally the method’s applicability is verified by simulations as well as hardware experiments.