Towards cooperative collision avoidance for the Voyager unmanned ground vehicle: Practical implementation and demonstration

Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Stellenbosch University, South Africa

Abstract

This paper presents the practical implementation and testing of a multi-agent cooperative collision avoidance system on the CSIR’s Voyager mobile robotic platform. The system consists of a long-term global path planner and a short-term local path planner. Multiple robotic platforms execute their individual global paths while broadcasting their intent and cooperatively predicting short-term collisions. If a collision is predicted, the platforms cooperatively and sequentially plan and execute short-term collision avoidance paths, returning to their global paths. The effectiveness of the system is verified both in simulation and with practical tests using the physical Voyager robotic platform.