Coordination of Autonomous Mobile Entities

Abstract

Autonomous mobile entities, for example automated guided vehicles, are playing an increasingly important role in our everyday lives. Since these entities share their environment with each other and with humans, they need to coordinate their behaviour to ensure that strong safety constraints are respected. However, as sensing range and accuracy are inherently limited, and communication in wireless networks is unreliable, autonomous entities have access to only limited information about their environment and the current behaviour of other entities. This makes ensuring system-wide safety constraints particularly challenging. In this paper, we show how system-wide safety constraints can be translated into requirements on the behaviour of individual entities depending on the information available. We first present a formalism to express high-level system-wide safety constraints. We then introduce a notion of distributed responsibility allowing requirements on the behaviour of individual entities to be deduced. We show how this process can be applied to an example from the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) domain.