Multi-Autonomous Mobile Robot traffic Management Based on Layered Costmaps and a modified Dijkstra's Algorithm

Abstract

In recent times, the use of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) has increased in many industries. As more AMRs roam the same area, traffic management becomes essential to prevent congestion and deadlocks. In related work, traffic management is often achieved using sophisticated, centralised planning approaches, albeit this often suffers from scalability issues. This paper therefore explores an approach where multi-AMR traffic management is achieved with layered costmaps and a modified Dijkstra's algorithm. This keeps the global path planner in the individual AMRs, thus not suffering scalability issues. To achieve multi-AMR coordination, traffic lanes and restricted areas are added to the AMRs’ global costmaps. Furthermore, the AMRs also use a modified Dijkstra's algorithm that supports implementation of traffic directions. A proof-of-concept solution is implemented in Robot Operating System 2 with Nav2 and Gazebo. The implemented solution was tested against a standard solution without any traffic management in three scenarios designed to provoke collisions. The results indicate that the implemented solution can prevent a set of collisions better than one without traffic management.