Performance evaluation of a network flow based algorithm for multi robots coordinated motion planning

Multi-robots coordinated motion is gaining more attention in the robotics research community because of its significance to a variety of applications such as formation control, evacuation and object transformation. Even in situations where a single robot may accomplish the task required, the use of multiple robots offers the ability to parallelize problem solution and provide desirable features like time reduction and fault tolerance. In this paper, we study the performance of a network-flow based multi-robot path planning algorithm, [9]. The mapping of the multi robots path planning roadmap to network flow problems enables the application and use of combinatorial network flow algorithms. The recently proposed algorithm can be extended to solve other related path planning problems. We evaluate the performance of the algorithm in for deployment and evacuation scenarios. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness and potential of this algorithm.