Locality-preserving distributed path reservation protocol for asynchronous cooperative mobile robots

This paper presents a fully decentralized distributed path reservation system for a group of asynchronous cooperative mobile robots. The protocol assumes a mobile ad hoc network formed by the robots themselves, and takes advantage of the inherent locality of the problem in order to reduce communication. In contrast with other work, our protocol requires neither initial nor complete knowledge of the composition of the group. A performance analysis of the protocol provides insights for a proper dimensioning of system parameters in order to maximize the average effective speed of the robots