Distributed Timed Elastic Band (DTEB) Planner: Trajectory Sharing and Collision Prediction for Multi-Robot Systems

Autonomous navigation of mobile robots is a well-studied problem in robotics. However, the navigation task becomes challenging when multi-robot systems have to cooperatively navigate dynamic environments with deadlock-prone layouts. We present a Distributed Timed Elastic Band (DTEB) Planner that combines Prioritized Planning with the online TEB trajectory Planner, in order to extend the capabilities of the latter to multi-robot systems. The proposed planner is able to reactively avoid imminent collisions as well as predictively resolve potential deadlocks among a team of robots, while navigating in a complex environment. The results of our simulation demonstrate the reliable performance and the versatility of the planner in different environment settings. The code and tests for our approach are available online.