Concept of decentralized cooperative path conflict resolution for heterogeneous mobile robots

The proposed concept shows a method of solving emerging path planning conflict situations within a heterogeneous multi-robot system. Emerging conflict situations are solved by a decentralized system-wide communication, which includes an active exchange of relevant path planning information among all participants. Detection and prevention of collisions is based on applying geometrical operations on planned paths of the involved participants and a negotiation-based resolution of emerging path conflicts. Furthermore, the focus of the presented method aims at a performance optimized implementation and portability of the solution. The application of our concept is possible on a variety of robotic systems and mainly independent of the systems' navigation and path planning algorithms as it solves arising conflict situations between them. The evaluation is realized within a simulation environment and real application scenarios with two different vehicle types which showed an applicability of the concept to real world intralogistics environments.