Cooperative Motion Planning of Multiple Automated Vehicle Robots: A Quick IoT-Based Approach

In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid control approach for solving the multi-robot motion planning (MRMP) problem in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment, where the closed workspace is “abstracted” as a discrete event system (DES) that is modeled as a timed Petri net. In the DES, robot’s movement between adjacent confliction zones is viewed as a “transition”, by taking the robot kinematics into consideration. To ensure safety and efficiency, robots should not appear at the same conflict position at the same time and should not block each other. To this end, an online IoT-based approach is provided to control robots to travel in the closed workspace safely (without collisions) and efficiently (without deadlocks). Specifically, a high-level supervisory controller whose commands are in the form of transitions, is used to control robots to travel in the closed workspace. At the low-level, we explicitly capture the time-driven robot kinematics, and commands from the supervisory controller are translated into appropriate input signals to the actuators of the robots, which in turn influence states of the high-level DES. Simulation results demonstrate the expressiveness of the proposed model and the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.