From a Multi-robot Global Plan to Single-robot Actions

Abstract

Planning for and coordinating robots in a multi-robot system (MRS) is crucial for optimizing the performance of the whole MRS. Thus a plan for the movement of the MRS must exist. If some centralized entity calculates the plan, it may result in one plan for the whole group. Such a global plan, which shows how the MRS can reach a goal state, has to be transformed into action guidelines for each robot. This task becomes harder if such a global plan includes dependencies caused by necessary cooperation of the robots. In this paper we present an approach to transform a global multi-robot plan into single-robot actions. We also provide a method to determine how many robots are needed to fulfil the global plan while obeying some constraints. Here we use plans generated by a coordinated navigation planner with spatial constraints, but the method could be expanded to a more general class of plans built from a centralized entity.