Summary:
Communication delays can be catastrophic for multiagent systems. However, most existing state-of-the-art multiagent trajectory planners assume perfect communication and therefore lack a strategy to rectify this issue in real-world environments. To address this challenge, we propose Robust MADER (RMADER), a decentralized, asynchronous multiagent trajectory planner robust to communication delay. RMADER ensures safety by introducing (1) a Delay Check step, (2) a two-step trajectory publication scheme, and (3) a novel trajectory-storing-and-checking approach. Our primary contributions include: proving recursive feasibility for collision-free trajectory generation in asynchronous decentralized trajectory-sharing, simulation benchmark studies, and hardware experiments with different network topologies and dynamic obstacles. We show that RMADER outperforms existing approaches by achieving a 100% success rate of collision-free trajectory generation, whereas the next best asynchronous decentralized method only achieves 83% success.
Keywords: Asynchronous communication, autonomous aerial vehicles, decentralized control, multi-agent systems, open source software, robustness, swarm robotics.
JCR Impact Factor and WoS quartile: 4,600 - Q2 (2023)
DOI reference:
https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2023.3342561
Published on paper: February 2024.
Published on-line: December 2023.
Citation:
K. Kondo, R. Figueroa, J. Rached, J. Tordesillas Torres, P.C. Lusk, J.P. How, Robust MADER: Decentralized multiagent trajectory planner robust to communication delay in dynamic environments. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. Vol. 9, nº. 2, pp. 1476 - 1483, February 2024. [Online: December 2023]
