Decentralized probabilistic multi-robot collision avoidance using buffered uncertainty-aware Voronoi cells

In this paper, we present a decentralized and communication-free collision avoidance approach for multi-robot systems that accounts for both robot localization and sensing uncertainties. The approach relies on the computation of an uncertainty-aware safe region for each robot to navigate among other robots and static obstacles in the environment, under the assumption of Gaussian-distributed uncertainty. In particular, at each time step, we construct a chance-constrained buffered uncertainty-aware Voronoi cell (B-UAVC) for each robot given a specified collision probability threshold. Probabilistic collision avoidance is achieved by constraining the motion of each robot to be within its corresponding B-UAVC, i.e. the collision probability between the robots and obstacles remains below the specified threshold. The proposed approach is decentralized, communication-free, scalable with the number of robots and robust to robots’ localization and sensing uncertainties. We applied the approach to single-integrator, double-integrator, differential-drive robots, and robots with general nonlinear dynamics. Extensive simulations and experiments with a team of ground vehicles, quadroThis work was supported in part by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) domain Applied Sciences (Veni 15916) and the U.S. Office of Naval Research Global (ONRG) NICOP-grant N62909-19-1-2027. We are grateful for their support. A video of the experimental results is available at https: //youtu.be/5F3fjjgwCSs Hai Zhu Department of Cognitive Robotics, Delft University of Technology, Mekelweg 2, 2628 CD Delft, The Netherlands E-mail: h.zhu@tudelft.nl Bruno Brito Department of Cognitive Robotics, Delft University of Technology, Mekelweg 2, 2628 CD Delft, The Netherlands E-mail: bruno.debrito@tudelft.nl Javier Alonso-Mora Department of Cognitive Robotics, Delft University of Technology, Mekelweg 2, 2628 CD Delft, The Netherlands E-mail: j.alonsomora@tudelft.nl tors, and heterogeneous robot teams are performed to analyze and validate the proposed approach.

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