Alessandro Palleschi, Anna Mannucci, Danilo Caporale, Federico Pecora, Lucia Pallottino. Toward Distributed solutions for heterogeneous fleet coordination. Proceedings of the 2nd Italian Conference on Robotics and Intelligent Machines, 2020.

Abstract

Warehouse mobile robotics is nowadays entering the mass-production market. Increasing the number of mobile robots up to decades raises new challenges: current industrial practice relies on centralized fleet management, which might hinder efficacy in the case of large fleets. This paper proposes and discusses a partially and a fully distributed extension of a centralized loosely coupled algorithm for multi-robot coordination. In particular, we aim at investigating: 1) how coordination can be distributed among robots, and 2) which is the minimum amount of local information required to enforce safety. Simulation results show that a partial distribution may improve performance in terms of arrival times while preserving safety and liveness.

@inproceedings{palleschitoward,
title={Toward distributed solutions for heterogeneous fleet coordination},
author={Palleschi, A. and Mannucci, A. and Caporale, D. and Pecora, F. and Pallottino, L.},
booktitle =    "Proceedings of the 2nd Italian Conference on Robotics and Intelligent Machines",
year =         {2020},
}