Abstract
Through this study, we introduce the idea of applying scheduling techniques to allocate spatial resources that are shared among multiple robots moving in a static environment and having temporal constraints on the arrival time to destinations. To illustrate this idea, we present an exemplified algorithm that plans and assigns a motion path to each robot. The considered problem is particularly challenging because: (i) the robots share the same environment and thus the planner must take into account overlapping paths which cannot happen at the same time; (ii) there are time deadlines thus the planner must deal with temporal constraints; (iii) new requests arrive without a priori knowledge thus the planner must be able to add new paths online and adjust old plans; (iv) the robot motion is subject to noise thus the planner must be reactive to adapt to online changes. We showcase the functioning of the proposed algorithm through a set of agent-based simulations.
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Notes
- 1.
The term “acceptance test” or “schedulability test” is also used in traditional real-time systems to refer to the decision process of accepting or rejecting a task based on the ability of scheduling it under the given time constraints.
- 2.
EDF is a preemptive optimal scheduling algorithm for dynamic priorities. The tasks’ priorities are updated during the execution of the tasks based on the current conditions.
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Khaluf, Y., Markarian, C., Simoens, P., Reina, A. (2017). Scheduling Access to Shared Space in Multi-robot Systems. In: Demazeau, Y., Davidsson, P., Bajo, J., Vale, Z. (eds) Advances in Practical Applications of Cyber-Physical Multi-Agent Systems: The PAAMS Collection. PAAMS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10349. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59930-4_12
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