Distributed Multi-level Motion Planning for Autonomous Vehicles in Large Scale Industrial Environments

In this paper we propose a distributed coordination algorithm for safe and efficient traffic management of heterogeneous robotic agents, moving within dynamic large scale industrial environments. The algorithm consists of a distributed resource--sharing protocol involving a re--planning strategy. Once every agent is assigned with a desired motion path, the algorithm ensures ordered traffic flows of agents, that avoid inter--robot collision and system deadlock (stalls). The algorithm allows multi--level representation of the environment, i.e. large or complex rooms may be seen as a unique resource with given capacity at convenience, which makes the approach appealing for complex industrial e…