Prioritized Planning for Spatiotemporal Trajectory Coordination of Articulated Vehicles and Co-Simulation with ROS, Docker and Gazebo

Trajectory coordination is a key challenge when automating multiple robots in a shared workspace. Prioritized planning is a widely used technique to generate collision-free velocity profiles along fixed paths and has recently been extended for complex vehicle structures. We analyze the particularities of approximation methods for articulated vehicles in comparison with spatiotemporal occupancy tracking in logistics hubs. For debugging and testing of automation and coordination, we present a modular, dockerized architecture to simulate multiple instances of a ROS-based vehicle automation stack and its interaction with other robots (agents). By combining a kinematic OpenModelica model with a 3D simulation in Gazebo, we exploit their complementary capabilities and enable further research on multi-robot trajectory coordination.