Dead-locks and Break of Symmetry in Robot Coordination

The aim of this paper is to study the dead-locks produced by locally coordinate motion of robots with simplified dynamics. We assume that each agent is a point in the plane with the possibility of moving in any direction with bound on the norm of the velocity. The algorithms designed using cooperative controls are quite simple, thus it is possible to understand in detail the dead-locks that may appear. Once the typical dead-locks are analyzed, a special break of symmetry procedure is designed to exit the dead-lock manifold. Agents activate such procedure when they detect to be in dead-lock position.