Asynchronous Multiagent Algorithms for Warehouse Robot Coordination

Abstract:
As e-commerce companies experience increasing demands, the need to efficiently manage logistic centers has motivated the development of new multiagent algorithms specialized in this task. This work deals with the specific problem of coordinating large groups of robots to deliver boxes from their original positions to their targets in a short amount of time, while avoiding collisions between each other. The solution proposed here divides the problem in two different parts, one concerned with the long-term delivery strategy and the other with the pathfinding. The first problem is tackled by a new algorithm, inspired by multiagent rollout and multiagent dynamic programming, which is capable of dealing with very complex problems by focusing on smaller subproblems in it. The second problem is solved using multiagent dynamic programming, optimizing the paths of the robots sequentially. The performance of the methods developed is analyzed, and then they are combined in a final program in order to provide a complete solution to the problem. The resulting program manages efficiently the robots in a computational simulation of the warehouse.