Efficient Collaborative Navigation through Perception Fusion for Multi-Robots in Unknown Environments

For tasks conducted in unknown environments with efficiency requirements, real-time navigation of multi-robot systems remains challenging due to unfamiliarity with surroundings.In this paper, we propose a novel multi-robot collaborative planning method that leverages the perception of different robots to intelligently select search directions and improve planning efficiency. Specifically, a foundational planner is employed to ensure reliable exploration towards targets in unknown environments and we introduce Graph Attention Architecture with Information Gain Weight(GIWT) to synthesizes the information from the target robot and its teammates to facilitate effective navigation around obstacles.In GIWT, after regionally encoding the relative positions of the robots along with their perceptual features, we compute the shared attention scores and incorporate the information gain obtained from neighboring robots as a supplementary weight. We design a corresponding expert data generation scheme to simulate real-world decision-making conditions for network training. Simulation experiments and real robot tests demonstrates that the proposed method significantly improves efficiency and enables collaborative planning for multiple robots. Our method achieves approximately 82% accuracy on the expert dataset and reduces the average path length by about 8% and 6% across two types of tasks compared to the fundamental planner in ROS tests, and a path length reduction of over 6% in real-world experiments.

A Social Force Model for Multi-Agent Systems With Application to Robots Traversal in Cluttered Environments

This letter presents a model to address the collaborative effects in multi-agent systems from the perspective of microscopic mechanism. The model utilizes distributed control for robot swarms in traversal applications. Inspired by pedestrian planning dynamics, the model employs three types of forces to regulate the behavior of agents: intrinsic propulsion, interaction among agents, and repulsion from obstacles. These forces are able to balance the convergence, divergence and avoidance effects among agents. Additionally, we present a planning and decision method based on resultant forces to enable real-world deployment of the model. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness on system path optimization in unknown cluttered environments. The sensor data is swiftly digital filtered and the data transmitted is significantly compressed. Consequently, the model has low computation costs and minimal communication loads, thereby promoting environmental adaptability and system scalability.

Collaborative Goal Tracking of Multiple Mobile Robots Based on Geometric Graph Neural Network

Multi-robot systems are widely used in spatially distributed tasks, and their collaborative path planning is of great significance for working efficiency. Currently, different multi-robot collaborative path planning methods have been proposed, but how to process the sensory information of neighboring robots at different locations from a local perception perspective in real environment to make better decisions is still a major difficulty. To address this problem, this paper proposes a multi-robot collaborative path planning method based on geometric graph neural network (GeoGNN). GeoGNN introduces the relative position information of neighboring robots into each interaction layer of the graph neural network to better integrate neighbor sensing information. An expert data generation method is designed for the robot to advance in a single step, by which expert data are generated in ROS to train the network. Experimental results show that the accuracy of the proposed method is improved by about 5% compared to the model based only on CNN on the expert data set. In ROS simulation environment path planning test, the success rate is improved by about 4% compared to CNN and flowtime increase is reduced about 8%, which outperforms other graph neural network models.