A Review of Path-Planning Approaches for Multiple Mobile Robots

Numerous path-planning studies have been conducted in past decades due to the challenges of obtaining optimal solutions. This paper reviews multi-robot path-planning approaches and decision-making strategies and presents the path-planning algorithms for various types of robots, including aerial, ground, and underwater robots. The multi-robot path-planning approaches have been classified as classical approaches, heuristic algorithms, bio-inspired techniques, and artificial intelligence approaches. Bio-inspired techniques are the most employed approaches, and artificial intelligence approaches have gained more attention recently. The decision-making strategies mainly consist of centralized and decentralized approaches. The trend of the decision-making system is to move towards a decentralized planner. Finally, the new challenge in multi-robot path planning is proposed as fault tolerance, which is important for real-time operations.