AGV fleets isolate problems locally to avoid full stops
No Need to Stop the Fleet: Localized Anomaly Isolation via Dead Zones in AGV Fleets
Robotics
Summary
When one robot in a fleet breaks down or encounters a problem, the whole group usually stops for safety, which wastes time. This paper shows how robots can instead create 'dead zones' around trouble spots to stop only those affected and let others keep working. They also developed a way for robots far from the problem to safely take alternative routes around these zones. Their tests show this method keeps things moving while avoiding crashes or big delays.
What this means in practice
- •For warehouse managers: Reduce downtime by isolating local robot hazards instead of stopping the entire AGV fleet.
- •For industrial logistics teams: Maintain material flow by rerouting AGVs around localized problem areas detected during operations.
Authors
Natalia Ogorelysheva, Falk Howar, Jian-Jia Chen
Abstract
Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) fleets in production and logistics environments rely on a system-wide emergency stop to handle local anomalies such as malfunctions, hazards, or contaminated areas. While safe, this approach halts the entire fleet even when only a small area is affected, causing unnecessary downtime. This paper proposes dead zones --- a formally defined localized isolation approach that serves as an additional fail-operational mechanism for situations where a full system-wide halt is not strictly needed. Rather than shutting down the entire fleet, a dead zone isolates the anomalous area, allowing unaffected robots to continue operating normally. We introduce two operational strategies: basic dead zone handling, in which affected robots enter a dead zone and stop, and dead zone handling with escaping, in which robots that are sufficiently far from a dead zone reroute around it. For escaping on counterclockwise trajectories we prove collision-freedom with a bounded arrival delay for all escaping robots, provided a minimum pairwise separation is kept between robots. Experimental evaluation confirms the theoretical guarantees and characterizes the throughput tradeoffs between all three approaches: full emergency stop, basic dead zone handling, and dead zone handling with escaping.