Real-time motion planning and decision-making for a group of
differential drive robots under connectivity constraints using robust MPC and
mixed-integer programming
This work is concerned with the problem of planning trajectories and
assigning tasks for a Multi-Agent System (MAS) comprised of differential drive
robots. We propose a multirate hierarchical control structure that employs a
planner based on robust Model Predictive Control (MPC) with mixed-integer
programming (MIP) encoding. The planner computes trajectories and assigns tasks
for each element of the group in real-time, while also guaranteeing the
communication network of the MAS to be robustly connected at all times.
Additionally, we provide a data-based methodology to estimate the disturbances
sets required by the robust MPC formulation. The results are demonstrated with
experiments in two obstacle-filled scenariosComment: Submitted to Advanced Robotics special issue on Online Motion
Planning and Model Predictive Contro