Guidance on Robot Coordination in Narrow Corridors with Yielding Bays

2026 年10 月 8 日 07:53 1

Hello Open-RMF maintainers and community,

We are using Open-RMF with ROS 2 Jazzy to operate mobile robots in a semiconductor FAB.

Our facility has many narrow corridors that are only wide enough for one robot at a time, but require bidirectional traffic. There are side bays at some locations where a robot can move aside and wait, while some sections have no alternative route.

When two robots approach from opposite directions, one needs to wait before entering the corridor or yield in a side bay to let the other pass. However, in our experiments, we encounter repeated negotiations and situations where the robots stop making progress.

We have tried adding an arbiter above RMF to coordinate corridor access and traversal order, but have not yet achieved reliable behavior. We are also experimenting with changes to the rmf_traffic cost function and local MAPF-based joint planning. Despite inspecting the A* search process, we are still unsure which parts of the system should be improved.

We would appreciate advice on the following:

1. Can the existing RMF planning and negotiation system handle yielding and passing using these side bays? Are there recommended navigation graph settings or configuration patterns?

2. Is an explicit corridor admission or reservation mechanism recommended, or would improving the core planning and negotiation logic be more appropriate?

3. Are cost-function changes or local MAPF integration a reasonable direction? Are there relevant implementations or APIs we could use as a reference?

We eventually plan to operate 30–40 robots across the facility, but our immediate goal is to reliably coordinate two robots traveling in opposite directions through a narrow corridor.

If helpful, we can share a simplified navigation graph and a reproducible scenario. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your time and help.