A comprehensive review of the latest path planning developments for multi-robot formation systems

Abstract There has been a continuous interest in multi-robot formation systems in the last few years due to several significant advantages such as robustness, scalability, and efficiency. However, multi-robot formation systems suffer from well-known problems such as energy consumption, processing speed, and security. Therefore, developers are continuously researching for optimal solutions that can gather the benefits of multi-robot formation systems while overcoming the possible challenges. A backbone process required by any multi-robot system is path planning. Thus, path planning for multi-robot systems is a recent top research topic. However, the literature lacks a recent comprehensive review of path planning works designed for multi-robot systems. The aim of this review paper is to provide a comprehensive assessment and an insightful look into various path planning techniques developed in multi-robot formation systems, in addition to highlighting the basic problems involved in this field. This will allow the reader to discover the research gaps that must be solved for a better path planning experience for multi-robot formation systems. Finally, an illustrative comparative example is presented at the end of the paper to show the advantages and disadvantages of some popular path planning techniques.