A Cooperative Co-evolutionary Genetic Algorithm for Multi-Robot Path Planning Having Multiple Targets

Abstract

A cooperative co-evolutionary genetic algorithm based method has been proposed in this work to plan multiple robots’ path. A domain knowledge-based operator named “Deletion Operator” and a method to find out the elite set of chromosomes have been developed for our proposed algorithm. A number of works have been carried out on multi-robot path planning, but most of them are suitable for robots having a single target only. Our proposed method can deal with the situation where each of the robots can have multiple targets without any predefined order. Hence, our objective is to get the shortest path from source to goal nodes considering that the goal nodes can appear in any order and the robots should not collide with any obstacles or other robots. The start nodes can also be the same as well as different for each of the robots. We have deployed our proposed method on a number of simulated environments to measure the efficacy of our proposed method. The experimental results reveal the effectiveness of the proposed method.