A Bi-Level Path Planning Algorithm for Multi-AGV Routing Problem

Avoiding the multi-automated guided vehicle (AGV) path conflicts is of importance for the efficiency of the AGV system, and we propose a bi-level path planning algorithm to optimize the routing of multi-AGVs. In the first level, we propose an improved A* algorithm to plan the AGV global path in the global topology map, which aims to make the path shortest and reduce the AGV path conflicts as much as possible. In the second level, we present the dynamic rapidly-exploring random trees (RRT) algorithm with kinematic constraints to obtain the passable local path with collisions in the local grid map. Compared to the Dijkstra algorithm and classic A* algorithm, the simulation results showed that the proposed bi-level path planning algorithm performed well in terms of the search efficiency, significantly reducing the incidence of multiple AGV path conflicts.