Bio-inspired Coordination and Control of Autonomous Vehicles in Future Manufacturing and Goods Transportation

Abstract

Abstract The will to apply bio-inspired techniques to coordinate and control autonomous X vehicles (AXVs) has increased tremendously during the last decade due to their advantages in the face of complexity in today’s demanding applications. Thus, several bio-inspired approaches for multiple-entities optimization have been proposed in the literature for various limited applications, e.g., drone coordination, mobile robot formation maintenance. In all these strategies, the entities must plan their path and control their movements while coordinating their behavior w.r.t. the other members, and they must avoid collisions, so the task could be very difficult in the unstructured environments present in future manufacturing plants and goods transportation. Future applications of these bio-inspired techniques for coordination and control of AXVs include large warehouses, manufacturing, logistics, last-mile delivery, etc. The AXVs could be grouped to carry larger goods or they can act as swarm members when they do not have a common goal, but they must interact while they move to complete the allocated tasks and intersect their paths with the paths of other entities. As such, this paper illustrates the concept of applying such bio-inspired coordination and control techniques for the development of future manufacturing and goods transportation, a discussion being carried out regarding the advantages and disadvantages of several techniques for their use in specific applications.