From Drinking Philosophers to Asynchronous Path-Following Robots

TL;DR

This paper reformulates multi-robot path execution as a distributed resource allocation problem using the Drinking Philosophers analogy, enabling collision-free control policies without requiring robots to estimate others' speeds.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach linking multi-robot path planning to the Drinking Philosophers Problem, with modifications for increased concurrency and deadlock avoidance.

Findings

Effective collision and deadlock avoidance demonstrated in simulations.

Method does not require robots to estimate others' speed profiles.

Competitive performance against state-of-the-art approaches.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the multi-robot path execution problem where a group of robots move on predefined paths from their initial to target positions while avoiding collisions and deadlocks in the face of asynchrony. We first show that this problem can be reformulated as a distributed resource allocation problem and, in particular, as an instance of the well-known Drinking Philosophers Problem (DrPP). By careful construction of the drinking sessions capturing shared resources, we show that any existing solutions to DrPP can be used to design robot control policies that are collectively collision and deadlock-free. We then propose modifications to an existing DrPP algorithm to allow more concurrent behavior, and provide conditions under which our method is deadlock-free. Our method does not require robots to know or to estimate the speed profiles of other robots and results in distributed control policies. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on simulation examples, which show competitive performance against the state-of-the-art.