Iterative Planning for Multi-Agent Systems: An Application in Energy-Aware UAV-UGV Cooperative Task Site Assignments
Neelanga Thelasingha, A. Agung Julius, James Humann, Jean-Paul Reddinger, James M. Dotterweich, Marshal Childers
Abstract
This paper presents an iterative planning framework for multi-agent systems with hybrid state spaces. The framework uses transition systems to mathematically represent planning tasks and employs multiple solvers to iteratively improve the plan until computational resources are exhausted. When integrating different solvers for iterative planning, we establish theoretical guarantees for recursive feasibility. The proposed framework enables continual improvement of solutions to reduce sub-optimality, efficiently using allocated computational resources. The proposed method is validated by applying it to an energy-aware UAV-UGV cooperative task site assignment problem. The results demonstrate continual solution improvement while preserving real-time implementation ability compared to algorithms proposed in the literature. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Note to Practitioners</i> —This paper presents an iterative planning solution for cooperative planning problems in multi-agent systems, which integrates multiple solvers to create an optimization framework. The proposed planning framework has been theoretically validated and applied in an energy-aware cooperative planning scenario for multi-vehicle task site assignments. The proposed framework can be applied to plan for any generalized task site assignment using multiple solvers iteratively.