Cooperative collision avoidance between multiple mobile robots

Abstract

This paper presents a new collision avoidance technique, called cooperative collision avoidance, for multiple mobile robots. The detection of the danger of collision between two mobile robots is discussed with respect to the geometric aspects of their paths as are cooperative collision avoidance behaviors. The direction control command and the velocity control command for the cooperative collision avoidance are then proposed. The avoidance technique is extended to cases in which the number of mobile robots is more than two. Furthermore, the conditions for collision avoidance are considered with respect to the navigation parameters and guidelines of designing the navigation parameters are obtained. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is demonstrated by means of numerical simulation and navigation experiments using two real mobile robots named Pioneer-1. Q 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.