On the application of safe-interval path planning to a variant of the pickup and delivery problem

We address a variant of multi-agent pickup and delivery problem and decouple into two parts: task allocation and path planning. We employ the any-angle Safe-Interval Path Planning algorithm introduced in our recent work and study the performance of several task allocation strategies. Furthermore, the proposed approach has been integrated into a control system to verify its feasibility in deployment on real robots. A key part of the system is a visual localization system which is based on the detection of unique artificial markers placed in the working environment. The conducted experiments show that generated plans can be safely executed on a real system. Copyright © 2020 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved.