Locality-preserving distributed path reservation protocol for asynchronous cooperative mobile robots

Many interesting applications of mobile robotics envision groups or swarms of robots cooperating toward a common goal. Due to their inherent mobility and limited energy resources, it is only natural to consider that the robots form a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) on which they can rely for their communication. Cooperation is however difficult to obtain under the weak communication guarantees offered by MANETs. In this paper, we focus on a very fundamental cooperation problem, namely, preventing the robots from colliding against each other in a fully decentralized manner. This paper presents a distributed path reservation system for a group of “blind” mobile robots. The protocol assumes a mobile ad hoc network formed by the robots themselves, and takes advantage of the inherent locality of the problem in order to reduce communication. In contrast with other work, our protocol requires neither initial nor complete knowledge of the composition of the group. The protocol makes only very weak timing assumptions regarding both communication and movement, and relies instead on a well-defined neighborhood discovery primitive.リサーチレポート（北陸先端科学技術大学院大学情報科学研究科