Variational collision avoidance problems on Riemannian manifolds

In this article we introduce a variational approach to collision avoidance of multiple agents evolving on a Riemannian manifold and derive necessary conditions for extremals. The problem consists of finding non-intersecting trajectories of a given number of agents, among a set of admissible curves, to reach a specified configuration, based on minimizing an energy functional that depends on the velocity, covariant acceleration and an artificial potential function used to prevent collision among the agents. The results are validated through numerical experiments on the manifolds $\mathbb{R}^{2}$ and $S^2$

Variational collision and obstacle avoidance of multi-agent systems on Riemannian manifolds

In this paper we study a path planning problem from a variational approach to collision and obstacle avoidance for multi-agent systems evolving on a Riemannian manifold. The problem consists of finding non-intersecting trajectories between the agent and prescribed obstacles on the workspace, among a set of admissible curves, to reach a specified configuration, based on minimizing an energy functional that depends on the velocity, covariant acceleration and an artificial potential function used to prevent collision with the obstacles and among the agents. We apply the results to examples of a planar rigid body, and collision and obstacle avoidance for agents evolving on a sphere.Comment: Submitted to European Control Conference 202

Symmetry Reduction in Optimal Control of Multiagent Systems on Lie Groups

We study the reduction of degrees of freedom for the equations that determine necessary optimality conditions for extrema in an optimal control problem for a multiagent system by exploiting the physical symmetries of agents, where the kinematics of each agent is given by a left-invariant control system. Reduced optimality conditions are obtained using techniques from variational calculus and Lagrangian mechanics. A Hamiltonian formalism is also studied, where the problem is explored through an application of Pontryagin's maximum principle for left-invariant systems, and the optimality conditions are obtained as integral curves of a reduced Hamiltonian vector field. We apply the results to an energy-minimum control problem for multiple unicycles.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Vol 65 (11), 4973-4980. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1802.0122

Variational Collision Avoidance on Riemannian Manifolds

This paper studies variational collision avoidance problems for multi-agents systems on complete Riemannian manifolds. That is, we minimize an energy functional, among a set of admissible curves, which depends on an artificial potential function used to avoid collision between the agents. We show the global existence of minimizers to the variational problem and we provide conditions under which it is possible to ensure that agents will avoid collision within some desired tolerance. We also study the problem where trajectories are constrained to have uniform bounds on the derivatives, and derive alternate safety conditions for collision avoidance in terms of these bounds - even in the case where the artificial potential is not sufficiently regular to ensure existence of global minimizers.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figure