rmader
Robust MADER: Decentralized Multiagent Trajectory Planner Robust to Communication Delay in Dynamic Environments
Kondo, Kota, Figueroa, Reinaldo, Rached, Juan, Tordesillas, Jesus, Lusk, Parker C., How, Jonathan P.
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.
Robust MADER: Decentralized and Asynchronous Multiagent Trajectory Planner Robust to Communication Delay
Kondo, Kota, Tordesillas, Jesus, Figueroa, Reinaldo, Rached, Juan, Merkel, Joseph, Lusk, Parker C., How, Jonathan P.
Abstract-- Although communication delays can disrupt multiagent systems, most of the existing multiagent trajectory planners lack a strategy to address this issue. State-ofthe-art approaches typically assume perfect communication environments, which is hardly realistic in real-world experiments. This paper presents Robust MADER (RMADER), a decentralized and asynchronous multiagent trajectory planner that can handle communication delays among agents. By broadcasting both the newly optimized trajectory and the committed trajectory, and by performing a delay check step, RMADER is able to guarantee safety even under communication delay. RMADER was validated through extensive simulation and hardware flight experiments and achieved a 100% success rate of collision-free trajectory generation, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches.