Multi-Robot Warehouse Fleet: Cooperative Path Planning & Motion Control

01 Project Overview

Three AGVs, one crowded warehouse, six deliveries — and zero collisions. This MATLAB simulation, built for the Robot Path Planning and Mobile Robots course at Manipal Institute of Technology, pairs a cooperative A* planner that predicts and dodges other robots' paths with a reactive controller that guarantees safety in real time. The real payoff is the analysis: it doesn't just prove the fleet works, it hunts down and explains the one robot whose planner made an oddly cautious call.

02 Key Features & Achievements

3-robot AGV fleet cooperatively completing 6 tasks on a 40x40 warehouse grid

Modified A* planner treats other robots' predicted paths as dynamic soft obstacles

Reactive emergency-stop layer guarantees zero real collisions

Path smoothing removes redundant A* waypoints for efficient trajectories

Custom analytics pipeline scoring speed utilization and path-following accuracy

03 Technical Stack

MATLAB
A* Path Planning
Cooperative Multi-Robot Planning
Kinematic Motion Control
Reactive Collision Avoidance
Path Smoothing
Finite State Machine

04 Challenges & Solutions

Challenge 1

Keeping three robots collision-free on a shared, congested grid

Solution

Layered a predictive A* cost model with a reactive emergency-stop controller, achieving zero true collisions.

Challenge 2

Robot 2 planned a path nearly double its actual length (207 vs. 109 cells)

Solution

Traced it to an oversized conflict-penalty weight in the A* cost function, pinpointing the exact fix needed.

05 Key Achievements

Zero collisions across all six delivery tasks

95.14% fleet-average speed utilization

92.66% and 89.14% path-following accuracy for Robots 1 and 3

Diagnosed a planning anomaly in Robot 2 (52.61% accuracy) to a specific over-penalized cost term