A receding horizon approach for solving some cooperative control problems

We consider a setting where multiple vehicles form a team cooperating to visit multiple target points to collect rewards associated with them. The team objective is to maximize the total reward accumulated over a given time interval. Complicating factors include uncertainties regarding the locations of target points and the effectiveness of collecting rewards, differences among vehicle capabilities, and the fact that rewards are time-varying. We propose a receding horizon (RH) control scheme which dynamically determines vehicle trajectories by solving a sequence of optimization problems over a planning horizon and executing them over a shorter action horizon. The properties of the resulting cooperative controller are tested in a simulated environment and seen to match a reward upper bound with high probability. This exploratory work has also helped identify several issues for further research.

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