Decentralized Control for Optimizing Communication with Infeasible Regions

• Main Authors: Gil, Stephanie (Contributor), Prentice IV, Samuel James (Contributor), Roy, Nicholas (Contributor), Rus, Daniela L (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Springer Nature, 2018-04-10T15:59:50Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

In this paper we present a decentralized gradient-based controller that optimizes communication between mobile aerial vehicles and stationary ground sensor vehicles in an environment with infeasible regions. The formulation of our problem as a MIQP is easily implementable, and we show that the addition of a scaling matrix can improve the range of attainable converged solutions by influencing trajectories to move around infeasible regions. We demonstrate the robustness of the controller in 3D simulation with agent failure, and in 10 trials of a multi-agent hardware experiment with quadrotors and ground sensors in an indoor environment. Lastly, we provide analytical guarantees that our controller strictly minimizes a nonconvex cost along agent trajectories, a desirable property for general multi-agent coordination tasks.
United States. Army Research Office (Grant W911NF-08-2-0004)