Asynchronous Spatial-Temporal Allocation for Trajectory Planning of Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces an asynchronous spatial-temporal allocation method for trajectory planning in large-scale heterogeneous multi-agent systems, avoiding collision and improving efficiency through theoretical guarantees and practical experiments.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel asynchronous allocation approach for multi-agent trajectory planning that ensures collision avoidance and timely updates without global synchronization.

Findings

The method effectively avoids inter-agent collisions.

It improves completion time and movement efficiency.

Hardware experiments validate real-world applicability.

Abstract

To plan the trajectories of a large-scale heterogeneous swarm, sequentially or synchronously distributed methods usually become intractable due to the lack of global clock synchronization. To this end, we provide a novel asynchronous spatial-temporal allocation method. Specifically, between a pair of agents, the allocation is proposed to determine their corresponding derivable time-stamped space and can be updated in an asynchronous way, by inserting a waiting duration between two consecutive replanning steps. Via theoretical analysis, the inter-agent collision is proved to be avoided and the allocation ensures timely updates. Comprehensive simulations and comparisons with five baselines validate the effectiveness of the proposed method and illustrate its improvement in completion time and moving distance. Finally, hardware experiments are carried out, where $8$ heterogeneous unmanned ground vehicles with onboard computation navigate in cluttered scenarios with high agility.