An Analysis of the Reciprocal Collision Avoidance of Cooperative Robots
Abstract
This paper presents a formal approach that addresses the reciprocal robots collision avoidance, where two robots need to avoid collisions with each other, while moving in a common workspace. Based on our formulation, each physical robot acts fully independently, communicating with the corresponding virtual prototype and imitating its behavior. Each physical robot reproduces the pathway of its virtual prototype. With a view to collision avoidance, it is necessary to detect a possible collision. This action includes the potentially intersecting regions test of the corresponding virtual prototypes. The estimation of the collision-free actions on the virtual robots and the collaborative work of the physical robots which imitate their virtual prototypes are the original ideas. Based on potentially intersecting regions of the virtual robots, we identified a collision-free motion corridor for two cooperative robots. Using the definition of velocity obstacles, we derived sufficient conditions for the collision-free motion of the two virtual robots. We tested the present approach on several complex simulation scenarios involving two virtual robots and estimating collision-free actions for each of them during the cooperative tasks. The focus of this paper is the identification of the collision-free actions for two virtual robots and their behavioral imitation by the physical robots