Real-time Motion Planning of Multiple Mobile Manipulators with a Common Task Objective in Shared Work Environments

This paper considers the problem of planning motions for a team of mobile manipulators working in the same environment with a common task objective. It presents a distributed, real-time algorithm to plan motion trajectory for each team member that allows dynamic and spontaneous division of work among team members to meet the common task objective. A mobile manipulator has to perform its share of the task while avoiding other moving mobile manipulators in the team in addition to other obstacles in the environment. To each robot team member, none of the trajectories of the other team members or moving obstacles are known beforehand. The approach is implemented and tested in simulated task environments, which demonstrates its high effectiveness and efficiency.