A heuristic-based route planning approach for a homogeneous multi-robot team

One of the main concerns in multi-robot applications is the effects of interactions among the robots on the total performance of the team. If the robots are assigned to spatially separate tasks, the negative impact of these interactions may be decreased. In this paper a VRP-based method is proposed to create non-intersecting routes for a team of robots. In the method, a heuristic approach composed of sweep, savings, and Dijkstra´s shortest path algorithm is used to find routes for each robot. Simulations are performed on some VRP test problems for different number of robots, and experiments are performed for a 13-node, 2-robot problem in a real environment. Results show that the method is very effective to determine non-intersecting routes for the individual robots of a team of robots