Cooperative Path-finding of Multi-robots with Wireless Multihop Communications

Path-finding by multiple robots has been studied by many researchers. In particular, when the robot is able to communicate with other colleague robots, the path-finding will be solved collaboratively among the robots. Main motivation of this paper is to apply the wireless multihop communication to the collaborative path-finding problem. For the purpose, we propose an algorithm called CPA (Cooperative Path-finding Algorithm), and report its performance by real implementation on Zigbee-based micro-robots and also by MATLAB simulations. There has been controversy over the wireless multihop communications on using it in typical wireless networks (e.g., cellular, WLAN) not only for technical but also for non-technical reasons. However, our initial study in this paper highlights a new potential of the multihop communication, in inter-robot information exchange.