Decentralized motion-coordination policy for cooperative mobile robots

Abstract

In this work we deal with a group of heterogeneous robots that cooperatively accomplish a task in a common area. For such a system, we develop a distributed control mechanism that ensures the correct coordination of their concurrent motion in the shared workspace. The concept assumes an additional level of robot motion control, that enforces temporary velocity reductions in order to avoid collisions as well as deadlocks and livelocks among the robots. The event-driven mechanism underlying the developed model ensures a robust coordination of mutually asynchronous robot controllers, and the mathematical character of the employed abstraction formally guarantees the control correctness.