Decentralized coordination of autonomous AGVs in flexible manufacturing systems

We present a decentralized approach used to coordinate several flexible automated guided vehicles (AGVs) operating in flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs). The decentralized coordination is based on a control policy for planning the collision-free motion, which takes into account kinematics and safety constrains. Besides this, in order to avoid deadlocks in critical zones, such as doors and corridors, a set of hazardous zones is defined, where mutual exclusion should be ensured. In order to consider the performance of the whole system, transportation tasks are allocated to the more appropriate member of the multi-robot team by a centralized auction. The interaction of AGVs operating under different collision conditions has been tested and evaluated in a real industrial setting. The primary contribution of this paper is to show empirically that the presented decentralized approach is viable, effective and safety for coordinating physical multi-robot systems in industrial environments.