2 research outputs found
Fast Trajectory Planning for Multiple Quadrotors using Relative Safe Flight Corridor
This paper presents a new trajectory planning method for multiple quadrotors
in obstacle-dense environments. We suggest a relative safe flight corridor
(RSFC) to model safe region between a pair of agents, and it is used to
generate linear constraints for inter-collision avoidance by utilizing the
convex hull property of relative Bernstein polynomial. Our approach employs a
graph-based multi-agent pathfinding algorithm to generate an initial
trajectory, which is used to construct a safe flight corridor (SFC) and RSFC.
We express the trajectory as a piecewise Bernstein polynomial and formulate the
trajectory planning problem into one quadratic programming problem using linear
constraints from SFC and RSFC. The proposed method can compute collision-free
trajectory for 16 agents within a second and for 64 agents less than a minute,
and it is validated both through simulation and indoor flight test.Comment: 8 pages, IROS2019 accepte
The impact of catastrophic collisions and collision avoidance on a swarming behavior
Swarms of autonomous agents are useful in many applications due to their
ability to accomplish tasks in a decentralized manner, making them more robust
to failures. Due to the difficulty in running experiments with large numbers of
hardware agents, researchers often make simplifying assumptions and remove
constraints that might be present in a real swarm deployment. While simplifying
away some constraints is tolerable, we feel that two in particular have been
overlooked: one, that agents in a swarm take up physical space, and two, that
agents might be damaged in collisions. Many existing works assume agents have
negligible size or pass through each other with no added penalty. It seems
possible to ignore these constraints using collision avoidance, but we show
using an illustrative example that this is easier said than done. In
particular, we show that collision avoidance can interfere with the intended
swarming behavior and significant parameter tuning is necessary to ensure the
behavior emerges as best as possible while collisions are avoided. We compare
four different collision avoidance algorithms, two of which we consider to be
the best decentralized collision avoidance algorithms available. Despite
putting significant effort into tuning each algorithm to perform at its best,
we believe our results show that further research is necessary to develop
swarming behaviors that can achieve their goal while avoiding collisions with
agents of non-negligible volume.Comment: Current submission to RAS, to appea