An Efficient Centralized Planner for Multiple Automated Guided Vehicles at the Crossroad of Polynomial Curves

In this letter, we introduce acentralized planner with low computational cost to schedule the motions of multiple Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) at the intersection of pre-defined polynomial curves. In particular, we find that the collision conditions between two AGVs along polynomial paths can be formulated as a set of polynomial inequalities. Furthermore, by solving these inequalities, the continuous boundaries of potential collision areas for vehicles can be determined offline and stored in a table. During the online phase, by also taking into account the priority setup among AGVs, the planner will use efficient table lookup to determine a list of intermediate goals for each AGV to move toward based on their real-time position feedback. In this way, the multiple robots are able to navigate on polynomial guide paths safely and efficiently at the crossroad, and the performance of our approach is demonstrated in a number of simulated scenarios. Videos of the experiments are available at https://sites.google.com/view/zqzhang/agvsplanner .