Multi-Agent Spatial Predictive Control with Application to Drone Flocking (Extended Version)

03/31/2022
by   Andreas Brandstätter, et al.
0

We introduce the novel concept of Spatial Predictive Control (SPC) to solve the following problem: given a collection of agents (e.g., drones) with positional low-level controllers (LLCs) and a mission-specific distributed cost function, how can a distributed controller achieve and maintain cost-function minimization without a plant model and only positional observations of the environment? Our fully distributed SPC controller is based strictly on the position of the agent itself and on those of its neighboring agents. This information is used in every time-step to compute the gradient of the cost function and to perform a spatial look-ahead to predict the best next target position for the LLC. Using a high-fidelity simulation environment, we show that SPC outperforms the most closely related class of controllers, Potential Field Controllers, on the drone flocking problem. We also show that SPC is able to cope with a potential sim-to-real transfer gap by demonstrating its performance on real hardware, namely our implementation of flocking using nine Crazyflie 2.1 drones.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 4

research
03/11/2019

Sim-to-(Multi)-Real: Transfer of Low-Level Robust Control Policies to Multiple Quadrotors

Quadrotor stabilizing controllers often require careful, model-specific ...
research
04/12/2023

Distributed Coverage Control of Constrained Constant-Speed Unicycle Multi-Agent Systems

This paper proposes a novel distributed coverage controller for a multi-...
research
10/03/2021

Mixed Observable RRT: Multi-Agent Mission-Planning in Partially Observable Environments

This paper considers centralized mission-planning for a heterogeneous mu...
research
10/27/2021

Distributed Asynchronous Games With Causal Memory are Undecidable

We show the undecidability of the controller synthesis problem when both...
research
01/26/2023

Multi-Agent Congestion Cost Minimization With Linear Function Approximations

This work considers multiple agents traversing a network from a source n...
research
07/11/2022

Safe Drone Flight with Time-Varying Backup Controllers

The weight, space, and power limitations of small aerial vehicles often ...
research
10/27/2017

Declarative vs Rule-based Control for Flocking Dynamics

The popularity of rule-based flocking models, such as Reynolds' classic ...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset