DisCoF+: Asynchronous DisCoF with flexible decoupling for cooperative pathfinding in distributed systems

In our prior work, we outlined an approach, named DisCoF, for cooperative pathfinding in distributed systems with limited sensing and communication range. Contrasting to prior works on cooperative pathfinding with completeness guarantees which assume access to global communication and coordination, DisCoF does not make this assumption. The implication is that at any given time in DisCoF, the robots may not all be aware of each other which is often the case in distributed systems. As a result, DisCoF represents an inherently online approach since coordination can only be realized in an opportunistic manner between robots that are within each other´s sensing and communication range. However, there are a few assumptions made in DisCoF to facilitate a formal analysis which must be removed to work with distributed multi-robot platforms. In this paper, we present DisCoF⁺ which extends DisCoF by enabling an asynchronous solution, as well as providing flexible decoupling between robots for performance improvement. Furthermore, we evaluate our implementation of DisCoF⁺ by implementing our distributed multi-robot algorithm in the Webots simulator. Finally, we compare DisCoF⁺ with DisCoF in terms of plan quality and planning performance.