Towards decentralized coordination of multi robot systems in industrial environments: A hierarchical traffic control strategy

This paper describes an innovative approach to manage multiple Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) in an industrial environment. The proposed approach is based on a two layer architecture for path planning. This architecture consists of a topological layer, composed by macro-cells, and of a route map layer in which the AGVs have to move along fixed paths. The traffic is managed in a decentralized manner. Each AGV computes autonomously its own path both at topological layer and at route map layer. The coordination among the AGVs is based on the negotiation of shared resources. An early phase of validation is provided by the simulation in a structured environment.