Path Planning for Unified Scheduling of Multi-Robot Based on BSO Algorithm

Abstract

The technology for path planning of independent mobile robots is mature, but multi-robot path planning for unified scheduling and allocation is much more complex than single-robot path planning. This requires consideration of collision problems between robots, general optimal path problems, etc. This paper proposes the use of the BSO algorithm for unified scheduling and allocation of multiple robots to improve the efficiency of task execution. The BSO algorithm is a new type of intelligent optimization algorithm that uses clustering ideas to search for local optimal solutions and obtains global optimal solutions by comparing local optimal solutions. It also uses mutation ideas to increase the diversity of the algorithm and avoid becoming trapped in local optimal solutions. Using the GA/SA algorithm and the proposed BSO algorithm for computer simulation comparison, we obtained the optimal path planning for the three robots under unified scheduling. The total distance of the optimal path obtained by the BSO algorithm was 27.36% and 25.31% shorter than those of the GA and SA algorithms, respectively. To further test the performance of the BSO algorithm, we conducted additional experiments on the unified scheduling of multiple robots. The experimental results show that the proposed BSO algorithm can significantly improve the efficiency. The multi-robot under unified scheduling performs point-to-point path planning without collisions, and they can traverse all task target points in the shortest path without repetition. This algorithm is suitable for multi-robot tasks in large-scale environments.