Author: ppareek

This past week, my main focus was writing the robot’s task and motion planner. The current version of the algorithm works by assigning priorities to each robot and then precomputing the paths for all the robots so that they don’t collide. This works by planning in (x, y, theta, time). The map was discretized into a 2D grid where each box is 1cm x 1cm. This resolution can be changed as needed based on the planning time. The planner also takes into account the physical constraints of the robot (collision footprint, turn-radius constraints). Here is a picture of the result of planning for two robots. Paths to the pallet and from the pallet to the drop-off zone are planned at the same time.

This week, most of my time was dedicated to researching and designing the algorithm that we will use for motion planning. After looking at various multi-agent motion planning papers (including one’s using dynamic planning), I ended up using a derivative of an algorithm that assigns each robot a priority and plans in space-time configuration space. In this way, we are able to pre-compute the robot paths such that they don’t result in a collision. Once a robot has completed its task, it is assigned the lowest priority and plans around the other robots in a similar way. I have started writing out this algorithm, and I plan to have a proof-of-concept done by tomorrow (Sunday) EOD. In addition to this, I worked with Omkar and Saral on the design presentation that Omkar will be presenting next week.