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

TL;DR

Robust MADER (RMADER) is a decentralized, asynchronous multiagent trajectory planner that effectively manages communication delays, ensuring safety and collision-free paths in real-world experiments.

Contribution

This paper introduces RMADER, a novel multiagent trajectory planning algorithm that guarantees safety despite communication delays, unlike existing methods assuming perfect communication.

Findings

Achieved 100% collision-free success rate in simulations and hardware tests.

Outperformed state-of-the-art approaches in handling communication delays.

Validated robustness of RMADER in real-world multiagent flight experiments.

Abstract

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.