DoViT-Swarm: A Lightweight Dynamic Optimal Virtual Tube Planner for Swarm Aerial Robotics in Cluttered Environments

Abstract

Trajectory planning for swarm aerial robotics in cluttered and dynamic environments is significantly challenging. Most existing centralized planner for swarm robots either assume a static environment or impose prohibitive computational overhead. In this letter, a lightweight dynamic optimal virtual tube planner, DoViT-Swarm, is proposed. This method enables the generation of infinite optimal trajectories within the dynamic virtual tube while maintaining computational complexity independent of the number of agents in the swarm. To address multiple dynamic obstacles with distinct motions, an event-triggered real-time trajectory re-planning strategy with motion estimation of obstacles is proposed to enable obstacle avoidance while preserving the optimality and homotopy of trajectories. The dynamic optimal virtual tube is then constructed for reliable and safe motion of swarm robots. Both simulation and real-world experiments were conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.