DisCoF$^+$: Asynchronous DisCoF with Flexible Decoupling for Cooperative Pathfinding in Distributed Systems

TL;DR

DisCoF$^+$ is an extended, asynchronous version of DisCoF that improves cooperative pathfinding in distributed multi-robot systems by enabling flexible decoupling and removing previous assumptions, with formal guarantees and simulation validation.

Contribution

It introduces DisCoF$^+$, an asynchronous, flexible decoupling extension of DisCoF, with formal analysis and simulation demonstrating improved performance and plan quality.

Findings

DisCoF$^+$ achieves better planning performance than DisCoF.

Formal guarantees are extended from DisCoF to DisCoF$^+$.

Simulation confirms effectiveness in distributed multi-robot environments.

Abstract

In our prior work, we outlined an approach, named DisCoF, for cooperative pathfinding in distributed systems with limited sensing and communication range. Contrasting to prior works on cooperative pathfinding with completeness guarantees, which often assume the access to global information, DisCoF does not make this assumption. The implication is that at any given time in DisCoF, the robots may not all be aware of each other, which is often the case in distributed systems. As a result, DisCoF represents an inherently online approach since coordination can only be realized in an opportunistic manner between robots that are within each other's sensing and communication range. However, there are a few assumptions made in DisCoF to facilitate a formal analysis, which must be removed to work with distributed multi-robot platforms. In this paper, we present DisCoF$^+$, which extends DisCoF by enabling an asynchronous solution, as well as providing flexible decoupling between robots for performance improvement. We also extend the formal results of DisCoF to DisCoF$^+$. Furthermore, we evaluate our implementation of DisCoF$^+$ and demonstrate a simulation of it running in a distributed multi-robot environment. Finally, we compare DisCoF$^+$ with DisCoF in terms of plan quality and planning performance.