Decentralized motion planning for cooperative nonholonomic mobile robots ⋆

This paper presents a decentralized motion planner for a formation of autonomous mobile robots evolving in an unknown environment with obstacles. The motion planning scheme consists of decentralized receding horizon planners that reside on each vehicle to achieve coordination among formation agents. The advantage of the proposed algorithm is that each vehicle only requires local knowledge of its neighboring vehicles. The main requirement for designing an optimal conflict-free trajectory in a decentralized way, is that each robot does not deviate too far from its assumed trajectory designed without taking the coupling constraints into account. Finally, a comparative study between the proposed algorithm and other existing algorithms is provided in order to show the advantages especially in terms of computing time.