Mission control: Local versus global modeling of robot tasking and routing

This paper presents two modeling approaches for a cooperative control problem for a homogeneous team of robots acting on a cellular two-dimensional space which includes targets and obstacles. First a combinatorial assignment and scheduling approach is used to generate collision free trajectories for the robots. The second approach formulates the optimization problem of finding collision free and optimal trajectories using a receding horizon approach. This approach uses a sequence of optimization problems which are solved for a planning horizon which are then executed over a shorter action horizon. The two modeling approaches are tested and evaluated using illustrative simulation examples.