Generalized WarpDriver: Unified Collision Avoidance for Multi-Robot Systems in Arbitrarily Complex Environments

Abstract

In this paper we present a unified collision-avoidance algorithm for the navigation of arbitrary agents, from pedestrians to various types of robots, including vehicles. This approach significantly extends the WarpDriver algorithm [27] specialized for disc-like agents (e.g. crowds) to a wide array of robots in the following ways: (1) the new algorithm is more robust by unifiying the original set of Warp Operators for different nonlinear extrapolations of motion into a single, general operator; (2) the algorithm is generalized to support agent dynamics and additional shapes beyond just circles; and (3) with addition of few, simple soft constraints, the algorithm can be used to simulate vehicle traffic. Thanks to the generality of the unified algorithm without special case handling, the new capabilities are tighly integrated at the level of collision avoidance, rather than as added layers of multiple heuristics on top of various collision-avoidance schemes designed independently for pedestrians vs. different types of robots and vehicles.