Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV)
anomaly isolation
emergency stop
downtime
dead zones
No Need to Stop the Fleet: Localized Anomaly Isolation via Dead Zones in AGV Fleets
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the problem of unnecessary downtime in automated guided vehicle (AGV) fleets caused by global emergency stops triggered by local anomalies. We propose a fault-tolerant operation strategy based on a “dead-zone” mechanism, which locally isolates anomalous regions and integrates basic handling with escape path planning to enable unaffected robots to continue operations or safely detour. By synthesizing formal verification with distributed control theory, this work rigorously proves collision-freedom and bounded delay for counterclockwise trajectories. Experiments quantitatively compare the throughput trade-offs among emergency stop, basic dead-zone, and escape dead-zone schemes, demonstrating that the proposed mechanism significantly enhances overall operational efficiency while guaranteeing system safety.
📝 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.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Automated Guided Vehicles
Dead Zones
Anomaly Isolation
Collision-freedom
Fail-operational
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