No Need to Stop the Fleet: Localized Anomaly Isolation via Dead Zones in AGV Fleets

Key points

• This paper proposes dead zones --- a formally defined localized isolation approach that serves as an additional fail-operational mechanism for situations where a full system-wide halt is not strictly needed.1
• We introduce two operational strategies: basic dead zone handling, in which affected robots enter a dead zone and stop, and dead zone handling with escaping, in which robots that are sufficiently far from a dead zone reroute around it.1
• For escaping on counterclockwise trajectories we prove collision-freedom with a bounded arrival delay for all escaping robots, provided a minimum pairwise separation is kept between robots.1
• Experimental evaluation confirms the theoretical guarantees and characterizes the throughput tradeoffs between all three approaches: full emergency stop, basic dead zone handling, and dead zone handling with escaping.1

Sources (1)

• [1]No Need to Stop the Fleet: Localized Anomaly Isolation via Dead Zones in AGV Fleets
  arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 6, 03:20 PM

  Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) fleets in production and logistics environments rely on a system-wide emergency stop to handle local anomalies such as malfunctions, hazards, or contaminated areas.

  This paper proposes dead zones --- a formally defined localized isolation approach that serves as an additional fail-operational mechanism for situations where a full system-wide halt is not strictly needed.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.