Iterative Motion Planning in Multi-agent Systems with Opportunistic Communication under Disturbance

Neelanga Thelasingha, Agung Julius, James Humann, James Dotterweich

Abstract: In complex multi-agent systems involving heterogeneous teams, uncertainty arises from numerous sources like environmental disturbances, model inaccuracies, and changing tasks. This causes planned trajectories to become infeasible, requiring replanning. Further, different communication architectures used in multi-agent systems give rise to asymmetric knowledge of planned trajectories across the agents. In such systems, replanning must be done in a communication-aware fashion. This paper establishes the conditions for synchronization and feasibility in epistemic planning scenarios introduced by opportunistic communication architectures. We also establish conditions on task satisfaction based on quantified recoverability of disturbances in an iterative planning scheme. We further validate these theoretical results experimentally in a UAV--UGV task assignment problem.