Abstract -Moving a crowd of robots or avatars from their cnrrent configurations to some destination area without causing collisions is a challenging motion-planning problem because the high degrees of freedom involved. T w o approaches are often used for this type of problems: dewupledand eenlralired. The tradeoff of these two approaches is that the decoupled approach is considered faster while the centralized approach has the advantage of being complete. In this paper, we propose an efficient centralized planner that is much faster than the traditional randomized planning approaches. This planner uses a hierarchical sphere tree S~N C~U E to group robots dynamically. By takiog advantage of the problem characteristics on independently moving robots, we are able to design a practical planner with the centralized approach when the number of robots is rather large. We use several simulation examples to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the planner.
In REF , for example, a hierarchical sphere tree was proposed for controlling "crowds of robots".
Motion planning for a crowd of robots
2003 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.03CH37422)
2003 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.03CH37422)
Computer Science