Robust MADER: Decentralized Multiagent Trajectory Planner Robust to Communication Delay in Dynamic Environments

Communication delays can be catastrophic for multiagent systems. However, most existing state-of-the-art multiagent trajectory planners assume perfect communication and therefore lack a strategy to rectify this issue in real-world environments. To address this challenge, we propose Robust MADER (RMADER), a decentralized, asynchronous multiagent trajectory planner robust to communication delay. By always keeping a guaranteed collision-free trajectory and performing a delay check step, RMADER is able to guarantee safety even under communication delay. We perform an in-depth analysis of trajectory deconfliction among agents, extensive benchmark studies, and hardware flight experiments with multiple dynamic obstacles. We show that RMADER outperforms existing approaches by achieving a 100% success rate of collision-free trajectory generation, whereas the next best asynchronous decentralized method only achieves 83% success.

Robust MADER: Decentralized and Asynchronous Multiagent Trajectory Planner Robust to Communication Delay

Although communication delays can disrupt multiagent systems, most of the existing multiagent trajectory planners lack a strategy to address this issue. State-of-the-art approaches typically assume perfect communication environments, which is hardly realistic in real-world experiments. This paper presents Robust MADER (RMADER), a decentralized and asynchronous multiagent trajectory planner that can handle communication delays among agents. By broadcasting both the newly optimized trajectory and the committed trajectory, and by performing a delay check step, RMADER is able to guarantee safety even under communication delay. RMADER was validated through extensive simulation and hardware flight experiments and achieved a 100% success rate of collision-free trajectory generation, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches.