Incorporating Social Awareness into Control of Unknown Multi-Agent Systems: A Real-Time Spatiotemporal Tubes Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a decentralized, real-time control framework for multi-agent systems that integrates social awareness to ensure safe, timely task completion in dynamic environments.

Contribution

It develops a novel spatiotemporal tube-based control approach that incorporates social behavior indices for heterogeneous agents with unknown dynamics.

Findings

Framework guarantees safety and timing constraints.

Method is computationally lightweight and robust to disturbances.

Validated through simulation and hardware experiments.

Abstract

This paper presents a decentralized control framework that incorporates social awareness into multi-agent systems with unknown dynamics to achieve prescribed-time reach-avoid-stay tasks in dynamic environments. Each agent is assigned a social awareness index that quantifies its level of cooperation or self-interest, allowing heterogeneous social behaviors within the system. Building on the spatiotemporal tube (STT) framework, we propose a real-time STT framework that synthesizes tubes online for each agent while capturing its social interactions with others. A closed-form, approximation-free control law is derived to ensure that each agent remains within its evolving STT, thereby avoiding dynamic obstacles while also preventing inter-agent collisions in a socially aware manner, and reaching the target within a prescribed time. The proposed approach provides formal guarantees on safety and timing, and is computationally lightweight, model-free, and robust to unknown disturbances. The effectiveness and scalability of the framework are validated through simulation and hardware experiments on a 2D omnidirectional