Lab meeting April 10, 2014 (Channing): "CAPT: Concurrent assignment and planning of trajectories for multiple robots"

Title: CAPT: Concurrent assignment and planning of trajectories for multiple robots

Authors: Matthew Turpin, Nathan Michael, and Vijay Kumar
             GRASP Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

In: The International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), January 2014, 33: 98-112

Abstract:
In this paper, we consider the problem of concurrent assignment and planning of trajectories (which we denote CAPT) for a team of robots. This problem involves simultaneously addressing two challenges: (1) the combinatorially complex problem of finding a suitable assignment of robots to goal locations, and (2) the generation of collision-free, time parameterized trajectories for every robot. We consider the CAPT problem for unlabeled (interchangeable) robots and propose algorithmic solutions to two variations of the CAPT problem. The first algorithm, C-CAPT, is a provably correct, complete, centralized algorithm which guarantees collision-free optimal solutions to the CAPT problem in an obstacle-free environment. To achieve these strong claims, C-CAPT exploits the synergy obtained by combining the two subproblems of assignment and trajectory generation to provide computationally tractable solutions for large numbers of robots. We then propose a decentralized solution to the CAPT problem through d-CAPT, a decentralized algorithm that provides suboptimal results compared to C-CAPT . We illustrate the algorithms and resulting performance through simulation and experimentation.

Download link: http://ijr.sagepub.com/content/33/1/98.full.pdf

Related Media link: http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~mturpin/summary.html