Multi-robot path finding with wireless multihop communications

Path finding by multiple robots has been studied by many researchers. In particular, when the robot is able to communicate with other colleague robots, path finding will be solved collaboratively among the robots. The main motivation of this article is to apply wireless multihop communications to the collaborative path-finding problem. For this purpose, we propose a cooperative path finding algorithm (CPA) and report its performance by real implementation on ZigBee-based micro-robots as well as MATLAB simulations. There has been some controversy over the use of wireless multihop communications in commercial wireless networks for technical as well as non-technical reasons. However, our study highlights a new potential of multihop communications in inter-robot information exchange. We show the effects of wireless communications on the operation of cooperative multi-robots and find the benefit of multihop communications.