Real-time cooperative collision avoidance method of multiple mobile robots

Abstract

In a previous study, the authors have proposed the Cooperative Collision Avoidance (CCA) method. The method extended the Velocity Obstacle to multiple mobile robot systems by introducing the concept of the Common Velocity Obstacle, and achieved cooperative collision avoidance among multiple mobile robot systems without supervisor or communication. The problem of the method was the enormous computation caused by the high dimensional search, and two improved CCA method are introduced in this paper. The first method transforms the search structure from a massive monolithic search into two separate light searches and this leads to significant reduction of the computation from O(a4) to O(a2), where a is the resolution of the search. The second method solves the search analytically by applying an assumption that every robot has a direction oriented objective. The effectiveness of the two methods are confirmed by the computer simulations.