Reciprocally-Rotating Velocity Obstacles

Abstract — Modern multi-agent systems frequently use high-level planners to extract basic paths for agents, and then rely on local collision avoidance to ensure that the agents reach their destinations without colliding with one another or dynamic obstacles. One state-of-the-art local collision avoi...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Andrew Giese, Daniel Latypov, Nancy M. Amato
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Subjects:
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.641.3408
Description
Summary:Abstract — Modern multi-agent systems frequently use high-level planners to extract basic paths for agents, and then rely on local collision avoidance to ensure that the agents reach their destinations without colliding with one another or dynamic obstacles. One state-of-the-art local collision avoidance technique is Optimal Reciprocal Collision Avoidance (ORCA). Despite being fast and efficient for circular-shaped agents, ORCA may deadlock when polygonal shapes are used. To address this shortcoming, we introduce Reciprocally-Rotating Velocity Obstacles (RRVO). RRVO generalizes ORCA by in-troducing a notion of rotation for polygonally-shaped agents. This generalization permits more realistic motion than ORCA and does not suffer from as much deadlock. In this paper, we present the theory of RRVO and show empirically that it does not suffer from the deadlock issue ORCA has, permits agents to reach goals faster, and has a comparable collision rate at the cost of performance overhead quadratic in the (typically small) user-defined parameter δ. I.