International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems ARTICLE SHP: Smooth Hypocycloidal Paths with Collision-free and Decoupled Multi-robot Path Planning Regular Paper Abhijeet Ravankar1*, Ankit A. Ravankar1, Yukinori Kobayashi1 and Takanori Emaru1 1 Laboratory of Robotics and Dynamics, Division of Human Mechanical Systems and Design, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan *Corresponding author(s) E-mail:
[email protected] Received 16 September 2015; Accepted 04 April 2016 DOI: 10.5772/63458 © 2016 Author(s). Licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract A novel ‵multi-robot map update‵ in case of dynamic obstacles in the map is proposed, such that robots update Generating smooth and continuous paths for robots with other robots about the positions of dynamic obstacles in the collision avoidance, which avoid sharp turns, is an impor‐ map. A timestamp feature ensures that all the robots have tant problem in the context of autonomous robot naviga‐ the most updated map. Comparison between SHP and other tion. This paper presents novel smooth hypocycloidal paths path smoothing techniques and experimental results in real (SHP) for robot motion. It is integrated with collision-free environments confirm that SHP can generate smooth paths and decoupled multi-robot path planning. An SHP diffuses for robots and avoid collision with other robots through local (i.e., moves points along segments) the points of sharp turns communication. in the global path of the map into nodes, which are used to generate smooth hypocycloidal curves that maintain a safe Keywords Path Smoothing, Robot Path Planning, Multi- clearance in relation to the obstacles.