Coordinated Collision-free Movement of Groups of Agents

Coordinating the movement of groups of autonomous agents in a crowded environment is a vital problem with application areas such as warehousing, computer games, or drone art. In this paper, we study the problem of finding collision-free paths for groups of agents such that the groups are kept together like a flock, a fish school, or a military unit. Specifically, we analyze the properties of the problem, propose a SAT formulation based on network flows, and perform a numerical experimental evaluation on various instance types. The results suggest that it is a challenging problem with promising research and application potential. Furthermore, we demonstrate the functionality of our solution method on real educational robots.