Cooperative co-evolution based distributed path planning of multiple mobile robots

This paper proposes novel multiple-mobile-robot collision avoidance path planning based on cooperative co-evolution, which can be executed fully distributed and in parallel. A real valued co-evolutionary algorithm is developed to coordinate the movement of multiple robots in 2D world, avoiding C-space or grid net searching. The collision avoidance is achieved by cooperatively co-evolving segments of paths and the time interval to pass them. Methods for constraint handling, which are developed for evolutionary algorithm, make the path planning easier. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated on a number of 2D path planning problems.