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

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. It is theoretically shown that the inter-agent collision is avoided and the allocation ensures timely updates. Comprehensive simulations and comparisons with state-of-the-art 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.