Collaborative motion planning for multi-agent systems

The main theme of this dissertation is autonomous navigation of multi-agent systems, with focus on entertainment applications. The goals are to study methods for safe navigation in cluttered and dynamic environments among many decision-making agents, and to explore how a designer or artist could seamlessly design the motion characteristics of a large team of mobile robots. Beside these two main results, methods for real-time interaction with a swarm of robots are also described. Novel algorithms are proposed and extensive experiments are performed with a large team of small pixel robots, robotic wheelchairs and quadrotor helicopters. This work paves the road towards multi-robot applications as well as autonomous navigation in dynamic environments. From a technological standpoint, a system formed by up to one hundred small mobile robots is also described, creating a novel display in which each pixel is a mobile robot of controllable color. Methods for real-time control are described that result in collision-free trajectories and that scale well to very large groups of agents.

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