Constraint Manifold Subsearch for multirobot path planning with cooperative tasks

The cooperative path planning problem seeks to determine a path for a group of robots which form temporary teams to perform tasks that require multiple robots. The multi-scale effects of simultaneously coordinating many robots distributed across the workspace while also tightly coordinating robots in cooperative teams increases the difficulty of planning. This paper describes a new approach to cooperative path planning called Constraint Manifold Subsearch (CMS). CMS builds upon M*, a high performance multirobot path planning algorithm, by modifying the search space to restrict teams of robots performing a task to the constraint manifold of the task. CMS can find optimal solutions to the cooperative path planning problem, or near optimal solutions to problems involving large numbers of robots.