Paper ID: 2209.13667

Robust MADER: Decentralized and Asynchronous Multiagent Trajectory Planner Robust to Communication Delay

Kota Kondo, Jesus Tordesillas, Reinaldo Figueroa, Juan Rached, Joseph Merkel, Parker C. Lusk, Jonathan P. How

Although communication delays can disrupt multiagent systems, most of the existing multiagent trajectory planners lack a strategy to address this issue. State-of-the-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.

Submitted: Sep 27, 2022