Multi-Robot Motion Planning via Parabolic Relaxation

Multi-robot systems offer enhanced capability over their monolithic counterparts, but they come at a cost of increased complexity in coordination. To reduce complexity and to make the problem tractable, multi-robot motion planning (MRMP) methods in the literature adopt de-coupled approaches that sacrifice either optimality or dynamic feasibility. In this letter, we present a convexification method, namely "parabolic relaxation," to generate dynamically feasible trajectories for MRMP in the coupled joint-space of all robots. Furthermore, we prove that the resulting trajectories satisfy the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker optimality conditions. We leverage upon the proposed relaxation to tackle the problem complexity and to attain computational tractability for planning over one hundred robots in extremely clustered environments. We take a multi-stage optimization approach that consists of i) mathematically formulating MRMP as a non-convex optimization, ii) lifting the problem into a higher dimensional space, iii) convexifying the problem through the proposed computationally efficient parabolic relaxation, and iv) penalizing with sequential search to ensure the recovery of feasible and near-optimal solutions to the original problem. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach is capable of tackling challenging motion planning problems with higher success rate than the state-of-the-art, yet remain computationally tractable for over one hundred robots in a highly dense environment.