Cooperative collision avoidance between multiple mobile robots

This paper presents a new collision avoidance technique, called cooperative collision avoidance, for multiple mobile robots. The detection of the dang er of collision between two mobile robots is discussed with respect to the geometric aspects of their paths as are cooperative collision avoidance beh aviors. The direction control command and the velocity control command for the cooperative collision avoidance are then proposed. The avoidance techni que is extended to cases in which the number of mobile robots is more than two. Furthermore, the conditions for collision avoidance are considered wit h respect to the navigation parameters and guidelines of designing the navi gation parameters are obtained. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is demonstrated by means of numerical simulation and navigation experiment s using two real mobile robots named Pioneer-1. (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.