Motion planning for a crowd of robots

Moving a crowd of robots or avatars from their current configurations to some destination area without causing collisions is a challenging motion-planning problem because the high degrees of freedom involved. Two approaches are often used for this type of problems: decoupled and centralized. 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 structure to group robots dynamically. By taking 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.