39 research outputs found
k-Color Multi-Robot Motion Planning
We present a simple and natural extension of the multi-robot motion planning
problem where the robots are partitioned into groups (colors), such that in
each group the robots are interchangeable. Every robot is no longer required to
move to a specific target, but rather to some target placement that is assigned
to its group. We call this problem k-color multi-robot motion planning and
provide a sampling-based algorithm specifically designed for solving it. At the
heart of the algorithm is a novel technique where the k-color problem is
reduced to several discrete multi-robot motion planning problems. These
reductions amplify basic samples into massive collections of free placements
and paths for the robots. We demonstrate the performance of the algorithm by an
implementation for the case of disc robots and polygonal robots translating in
the plane. We show that the algorithm successfully and efficiently copes with a
variety of challenging scenarios, involving many robots, while a simplified
version of this algorithm, that can be viewed as an extension of a prevalent
sampling-based algorithm for the k-color case, fails even on simple scenarios.
Interestingly, our algorithm outperforms a well established implementation of
PRM for the standard multi-robot problem, in which each robot has a distinct
color.Comment: 2
On the hardness of unlabeled multi-robot motion planning
In unlabeled multi-robot motion planning several interchangeable robots
operate in a common workspace. The goal is to move the robots to a set of
target positions such that each position will be occupied by some robot. In
this paper, we study this problem for the specific case of unit-square robots
moving amidst polygonal obstacles and show that it is PSPACE-hard. We also
consider three additional variants of this problem and show that they are all
PSPACE-hard as well. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first hardness
proof for the unlabeled case. Furthermore, our proofs can be used to show that
the labeled variant (where each robot is assigned with a specific target
position), again, for unit-square robots, is PSPACE-hard as well, which sets
another precedence, as previous hardness results require the robots to be of
different shapes
Finding a needle in an exponential haystack: Discrete RRT for exploration of implicit roadmaps in multi-robot motion planning
We present a sampling-based framework for multi-robot motion planning which
combines an implicit representation of a roadmap with a novel approach for
pathfinding in geometrically embedded graphs tailored for our setting. Our
pathfinding algorithm, discrete-RRT (dRRT), is an adaptation of the celebrated
RRT algorithm for the discrete case of a graph, and it enables a rapid
exploration of the high-dimensional configuration space by carefully walking
through an implicit representation of a tensor product of roadmaps for the
individual robots. We demonstrate our approach experimentally on scenarios of
up to 60 degrees of freedom where our algorithm is faster by a factor of at
least ten when compared to existing algorithms that we are aware of.Comment: Kiril Solovey and Oren Salzman contributed equally to this pape
Motion Planning for Unlabeled Discs with Optimality Guarantees
We study the problem of path planning for unlabeled (indistinguishable)
unit-disc robots in a planar environment cluttered with polygonal obstacles. We
introduce an algorithm which minimizes the total path length, i.e., the sum of
lengths of the individual paths. Our algorithm is guaranteed to find a solution
if one exists, or report that none exists otherwise. It runs in time
, where is the number of robots and is the total
complexity of the workspace. Moreover, the total length of the returned
solution is at most , where OPT is the optimal solution cost. To
the best of our knowledge this is the first algorithm for the problem that has
such guarantees. The algorithm has been implemented in an exact manner and we
present experimental results that attest to its efficiency
Efficient Multi-Robot Motion Planning for Unlabeled Discs in Simple Polygons
We consider the following motion-planning problem: we are given unit
discs in a simple polygon with vertices, each at their own start position,
and we want to move the discs to a given set of target positions. Contrary
to the standard (labeled) version of the problem, each disc is allowed to be
moved to any target position, as long as in the end every target position is
occupied. We show that this unlabeled version of the problem can be solved in
time, assuming that the start and target positions are at
least some minimal distance from each other. This is in sharp contrast to the
standard (labeled) and more general multi-robot motion-planning problem for
discs moving in a simple polygon, which is known to be strongly NP-hard