Petri Net Based Navigation Planning with Dipole Field and Dynamic Window Approach for Collision Avoidance

This paper presents a novel path planning system for multiple robots working in an uncontrolled environment in the presence of humans. The approach combines the use of Petri net to plan the movement of multiple robots to prevent the risk of congestion caused by routing several robots into a narrow region, together with a dipole field with dynamic window approach to avoid collisions of a robot with dynamic obstacles. By regarding the velocity and direction of both humans and robots as a source of magnetic dipole moment, the dipole-dipole interaction between the moving objects will generate repulsive forces to prevent collisions. The whole system is presented on robot operating system platform so that its implementation can be extendable into real robots. Experimental results with Gazebo simulator demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.