Geometric motion planning and formation optimization for a fleet of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots

In this paper, we present a geometric method for motion planning for a fleet of differentially-driven wheeled mobile robots moving in formation, which explicitly takes into account their nonholonomic constraints. The relative position within the formation induces different motion plans for each individual wheeled mobile robot (WMR). We can quantitatively evaluate the performance of such induced motion plans using suitable metrics defined for the motions of each WMR. These performance metrics in cumulative form or individual form are used to optimize the overall formation (i.e., their relative positions) for performing a given task. The approach is well suited for online implementation and is demonstrated using case studies.