Motion planning of multiple mobile robots with formation requirement

This paper presents a motion planning approach to coordinating multiple mobile robots in moving along the designed paths. The robots are required to fulfill the formation requirement during the motions subject to the constraints of velocity/acceleration bounds and mutual collision avoidance. The coordination is achieved by properly planning robots' velocities along the paths, which is modeled as a velocity optimization problem. An objective function to minimize the formation errors is established. A solution to achieve this objective function is obtained by the optimizer of LINGO (a linear interactive and general optimizer). Simulations and experiments are performed on a group of mobile robots to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.