Multi-Robot Navigation among Movable Obstacles: Implicit Coordination to Deal with Conflicts and Deadlocks
Résumé
How to find efficient paths for multiple robots in modifiable cluttered environments? This question leads us to the formulation of the new problem of Multi-Robot Navigation Among Movable Obstacles (MR-NAMO). In MR-NAMO, robots must not only plan for the possibility of displacing obstacles as needed to facilitate their navigation, but also solve conflicts that may arise when trying to simultaneously access a location or obstacle. As a first approach to this new problem, we introduce and compare variants of an implicit coordination strategy allowing the use of existing NAMO Algorithms in a Multi-Robot context. We also show how our previously introduced social occupation cost model can improve the efficiency of multi-robot plans with better obstacle placement choices, and how it can be applied in a novel way to find relevant robot placement choices in deadlock situations.