Experimental Analysis of Cooperative Behavior of Autonomous Mobile Robots against Congestion

In this paper, cooperative behavior of autonomous mobile robots against congestion is experimentally analyzed through multi-robot simulations. For this purpose, robots behavior regarding velocity is investigated. Two circular systems in which bottlenecks do not exist and exist are the research objects. In the simulation experiments, first off, a simple behavior model is applied to the robots. From the analysis results, behavioral features of the robots depending on two states, i.e., non-congestion and congestion, and presence or absence of bottlenecks are presented. These are criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of behavior models. After that, a proposed behavior model is applied to the robots and the effectiveness of cooperative behavior of the robots is evaluated on the basis of the criteria. Finally, it is shown that the proposed behavior model effectively solves jams or alleviates the influence in the congested systems regardless of bottlenecks.