Deadlock Prediction and Recovery for Distributed Collision Avoidance with Buffered Voronoi Cells

This paper introduces a distributed multi-robot collision avoidance algorithm based on the concept of Buffered Voronoi Cells (BVC). We propose a novel algorithm for avoiding deadlocks consisting of three stages: deadlock prediction, deadlock recovery, and deadlock recovery success prediction. Simple heuristics (such as the right-hand rule) are often used to avoid deadlocks. Such heuristics might reduce deadlock in simple configurations and sparsely populated environments, but they begin to fail in complex configurations and more densely populated environments. We evaluate the performance of our algorithm using an open-source web-based multi-robot simulation. The results show that while the proposed algorithm does not eliminate the occurrence of deadlocks, it drastically reduces their occurrence, and leads to a considerable improvement in performance, especially in high-density environments. We also validate the real-world performance of the proposed algorithm in live experiments.