Multi-Agent Motion Planning on Industrial Magnetic Levitation Platforms: A Hybrid ADMM-HOCBF approach

This paper presents a novel hybrid motion planning method for holonomic multi-agent systems. The proposed decentralised model predictive control (MPC) framework tackles the intractability of classical centralised MPC for a growing number of agents while providing safety guarantees. This is achieved by combining a decentralised version of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with a centralised high-order control barrier function (HOCBF) architecture. Simulation results show significant improvement in scalability over classical centralised MPC. We validate the efficacy and real-time capability of the proposed method by developing a highly efficient C++ implementation and deploying the resulting trajectories on a real industrial magnetic levitation platform.

Fast Near Time-Optimal Motion Planning for Holonomic Vehicles in Structured Environments

This paper proposes a novel and efficient optimization-based method for generating near time-optimal trajectories for holonomic vehicles navigating through complex but structured environments. The approach aims to solve the problem of motion planning for planar motion systems using magnetic levitation that can be used in assembly lines, automated laboratories or clean-rooms. In these applications, time-optimal trajectories that can be computed in real-time are required to increase productivity and allow the vehicles to be reactive if needed. The presented approach encodes the environment representation using free-space corridors and represents the motion of the vehicle through such a corridor using a motion primitive. These primitives are selected heuristically and define the trajectory with a limited number of degrees of freedom, which are determined in an optimization problem. As a result, the method achieves significantly lower computation times compared to the state-of-the-art, most notably solving a full Optimal Control Problem (OCP), OMG-tools or VP-STO without significantly compromising optimality within a fixed corridor sequence. The approach is benchmarked extensively in simulation and is validated on a real-world Beckhoff XPlanar system