Application of coordinated multi-vehicle formations for snow shoveling on airports

Abstract

In this paper, we present a framework that applies multiple groups of autonomous snowplow robots for efficiently removing the snow from airfields. The main idea is to form temporary coalitions of vehicles, whose size depends on the width of the roads to clean. The robots of a coalition then arrange in formation and accomplish assigned sweeping tasks. In the paper the problem of snow shoveling is divided into the subproblems of task allocation and motion coordination. For the task allocation we propose a multi-agent method designed for the dynamic environment of airports. The motion coordination part focuses on generating trajectories for the vehicle formations based on the output of the task allocation module. Furthermore a specific feedback controller is introduced that achieves optimal breadthwise road coverage even in sharp turns. All components as well as the complete system have been verified in various simulations. Additionally the motion coordination approach was tested in laboratory hardware experiments.