Motion planning for hundreds of floating robots
2026-06-08 • Robotics
Robotics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied how to plan safe paths for many floating robots moving on water without crashing into each other. They created a system that breaks down big groups of robots into smaller clusters to plan their movements separately and faster. Their method works quickly, even for hundreds of robots, and was tested both in simulations and real-life settings with 24 robots on a lake and at an art exhibition. This helps create coordinated robot performances more efficiently.
collision avoidancemulti-robot systemstrajectory planningfloating robotscollision graphinteraction clustersparallel computationrobot choreographysimulationreal-world deployment
Authors
Jan Kamm, Antonio Terpin, Raffaello D'Andrea, Aswin Ramachandran
Abstract
Planning collision-free motion for large robot fleets is difficult because collision avoidance induces strong inter-agent coupling that grows rapidly with team size. We consider omnidirectional floating robots on water, where choreographies are specified by sparse keyframes and an interactive tool must generate trajectories within seconds, even when transitions span minutes and thousands of time steps. We propose a scalable pipeline that builds a collision graph from an initialization, decomposes the coupled problem into interaction clusters, and solves clusters independently (and in parallel) with robustness mechanisms for common decomposition pathologies. We validate the approach in simulations up to 500 robots. The synthesized trajectories have also been deployed in two real-world demonstrations, on Lake Zürich with a fleet of 24 Way of Water crafts and at the Time Space Existence 2025 Venice Biennale.