Decentralized Multi-Agent Trajectory Planning in Dynamic Environments with Spatiotemporal Occupancy Grid Maps

TL;DR

This paper introduces a decentralized trajectory planning method for multiple MAVs using spatiotemporal occupancy grid maps, enabling effective collision avoidance in dynamic environments with static and moving obstacles.

Contribution

It extends kinodynamic A* and trajectory optimization algorithms to incorporate SOGMs for dynamic obstacle avoidance in a decentralized multi-agent setting.

Findings

Achieves competitive performance in dynamic obstacle environments

Successfully validated in real-world experiments

Handles arbitrary obstacle shapes effectively

Abstract

This paper proposes a decentralized trajectory planning framework for the collision avoidance problem of multiple micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) in environments with static and dynamic obstacles. The framework utilizes spatiotemporal occupancy grid maps (SOGM), which forecast the occupancy status of neighboring space in the near future, as the environment representation. Based on this representation, we extend the kinodynamic A* and the corridor-constrained trajectory optimization algorithms to efficiently tackle static and dynamic obstacles with arbitrary shapes. Collision avoidance between communicating robots is integrated by sharing planned trajectories and projecting them onto the SOGM. The simulation results show that our method achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods in dynamic environments with different numbers and shapes of obstacles. Finally, the proposed method is validated in real experiments.