You May Pass : A Comparative study of robot deadlock resolution strategies in corridors

Sammanfattning

The steady increase of autonomous robots in the workplace has lead to an escalating need for these robots to be able to coordinate their movement in shared enclosed spaces. When robots drive along a corridor, they are likely to meet on a collision course, which can lead to a deadlock where the robots cannot continue forward without resolution of the issue. Inspired by this development we study the performance of three different deadlock resolution strategies to compare their advantages and disadvantages. The strategies each demonstrate a different style of deadlock resolution: basic traffic rules, randomization and priority based resolution. Tests were performed in a simulated corridor environment, where the priority based resolution showed the altogether best results, although it also possessed major disadvantages. Based on our findings, we therefore designed an improved strategy, which in testing outperform all original three.