From Drinking Philosophers to Asynchronous Path-Following Robots
This addresses collision and deadlock avoidance for asynchronous multi-robot systems, offering a distributed solution with potential applications in robotics and automation.
The paper tackles the multi-robot path execution problem by reformulating it as a distributed resource allocation instance of the Drinking Philosophers Problem, enabling collision- and deadlock-free control policies without requiring knowledge of other robots' speeds, and demonstrates competitive performance in simulations.
In this paper, we consider the multi-robot path execution problem where a group of robots move on predefined paths from their initial to target positions while avoiding collisions and deadlocks in the face of asynchrony. We first show that this problem can be reformulated as a distributed resource allocation problem and, in particular, as an instance of the well-known Drinking Philosophers Problem (DrPP). By careful construction of the drinking sessions capturing shared resources, we show that any existing solutions to DrPP can be used to design robot control policies that are collectively collision and deadlock-free. We then propose modifications to an existing DrPP algorithm to allow more concurrent behavior, and provide conditions under which our method is deadlock-free. Our method does not require robots to know or to estimate the speed profiles of other robots and results in distributed control policies. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on simulation examples, which show competitive performance against the state-of-the-art.