Decentralized Multi-Agent Planning Using Model Predictive Control and Time-Aware Safe Corridors

Multi-agent planning has numerous real-world applications, such as autonomous agriculture, search and rescue, and infrastructure inspection. It is thus of tremendous benefit to improve on the state-of-the-art in multiple metrics to make autonomous multi-agent systems more efficient and a more viable real-world solution. In this letter, we propose a new framework for multi-agent planning in a static environment that improves upon the existing state-of-the-art in multiple areas such as computation time, trajectory smoothness, and feasibility. The proposed method first generates a global path that only avoids static obstacles and then generates a Safe Corridor around it. It then extends the notion of Safe Corridors and makes them time-aware in order to account for the future positions of other agents. The time-aware Safe Corridor, along with a local reference trajectory generated from the global path, are used in an Mixed-Integer Quadratic Program/Model Predictive Control formulation that generates a collision-free optimal trajectory. The proposed framework is real-time, decentralized, and synchronous. It is compared to two recent state-of-the-art methods in simulations. It outperforms both methods in robustness as well as feasibility and computation time.