MRBUG: A Competitive Multi-Robot Path Finding Algorithm

— We explore an on-line problem where a group of robots has to reach a target whose position is known in an unknown planar environment whose geometry is acquired by the robots during task execution. The critical parameter in such a problem is the physical motion time, which, under the assumption of uniform velocity of all the robots, corresponds to length or cost of the path traveled by the robot which reached the target. The Competitiveness of an on-line algorithm measures its performance relative to the optimal off-line solution to the problem. While competitiveness usually means constant relative performance, this paper uses generalized competitiveness, i.e. any functional relationship between online performance and optimal off-line solution. Given an online task, its Competitive Complexity Class is a pair of lower and upper bounds on the competitive performance of all online algorithms for the task, such that the two bounds satisfy the same functional relationship. We prove that ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICRA
• Authors: Shahar Sarid, Amir Shapiro, Yoav Gabriely
• Keywords: ICRA 2007, On-line Navigation Algorithm, Optimal Off-line Solution, Quadratic Competitive Performance, Robotics