Motion planning for hundreds of floating robots

2026-06-08

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of collision-free trajectory planning for large-scale omnidirectional floating robot formations on water, where strong coupling and combinatorial complexity hinder scalability. The authors propose an extensible planning pipeline that decomposes the coupled problem into interaction clusters via a collision graph, enabling parallel trajectory optimization within each cluster. A robust mechanism handles decomposition failures, and the framework supports real-time interactive editing under sparse keyframe constraints. This approach achieves, for the first time, the generation of smooth, minute-long, collision-free trajectories for hundreds of robots within seconds. The method is validated in simulations with up to 500 agents and successfully deployed in real-world scenarios, including a 24-boat formation on Lake Zurich and the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, thereby overcoming the scalability bottleneck in large-scale aquatic coordinated motion planning.

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.

Problem

• motion planning
• collision avoidance
• multi-robot systems
• floating robots
• scalability

Innovation

• scalable motion planning
• collision avoidance
• interaction clustering
• floating robots
• trajectory synthesis