Real-time motion planning and decision-making for a group of differential drive robots under connectivity constraints using robust MPC and mixed-integer programming

Abstract

This work is concerned with the problem of planning trajectories and assigning tasks for a Multi-Agent System (MAS) comprised of differential drive robots. We propose a multirate hierarchical control structure that employs a planner based on robust Model Predictive Control (MPC) with mixed-integer programming (MIP) encoding. The planner computes trajectories and assigns tasks for each element of the group in real-time, while also guaranteeing the communication network of the MAS to be robustly connected at all times. Additionally, we provide a data-based methodology to estimate the disturbances sets required by the robust MPC formulation. The results are demonstrated with experiments in two obstacle-filled scenarios

Submitted to Advanced Robotics special issue on Online Motion Planning and Model Predictive Control

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Proactive Emergency Collision Avoidance for Automated Driving in Highway Scenarios
• A Mixed-Integer Approach for Motion Planning of Nonholonomic Robots under Visible Light Communication Constraints
• Distributed Algorithm with Emergent Area Partitioning and Base Station's Situation Awareness for Multi-Robot Patrolling