New potential functions for multi robot path planning : SWARM or SPREAD

Artificial Potential Field (APF) is widely used for an autonomous robot path planning and navigation because of light complexity and elegance of results. Although it is useful in single robot path planning, appropriate algorithm for multi-robot path planning has not been proposed. Existing APFs which can apply to multi-robot only regard robots as obstacles even if these robots are not obstacles, or focus on SWARM formation and moving. This paper proposes a multi-robot support APF by defining new potential functions: SWARM or SPREAD. This APF uses priority selection scheme between multi robots and calculates a new potential functions based on priority, and then solves local minimum problem in multi-robot APF which is a traditional problem of APF. Therefore this paper enables distributed path planning in multi-robot with real-time using suggested APF. All of these works are verified its effectiveness with simulation using Player/Stage simulator.