Authors:
Yin Chen
;
Xinjun Mao
and
Fu Hou
Affiliation:
National University of Defense Technology, China
Keyword(s):
Deadlock, Rendezvous, Resource, Multi-robot System.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agents
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
Formal Methods
;
Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics
;
Intelligent Control Systems and Optimization
;
Planning and Scheduling
;
Robot and Multi-Robot Systems
;
Simulation and Modeling
;
Symbolic Systems
;
Task Planning and Execution
Abstract:
In this paper, we consider a multi-robot system (MRS) which executes task points associated with 2-D locations.
Each task point demands certain physical resources for its execution. A robot can fetch these resources
either from fixed stations, or by conducting rendezvouses with other robots who happen to possess these
resources, provided that the latter option can be more beneficial in terms of cost or resource availability. However,
applying rendezvouses may cause deadlock among robots, through (1) the tangling among rendezvouses,
or (2) sabotaging the resource consistency of the schedule of a robot which is originally holding the resources.
We analyse these problems and introduce a series of deadlock prevention rules that are embedded into an
A*-based rendezvous planning algorithm, so that both type of deadlocks can be avoided in the rendezvouses.