MR.CAP: Multi-Robot Joint Control and Planning for Object Transport

With the recent influx in demand for multi-robot systems throughout industry and academia, there is an increasing need for faster, robust, and generalizable path planning algorithms. Similarly, given the inherent connection between control algorithms and multi-robot path planners, there is in turn an increased demand for fast, efficient, and robust controllers. We propose a scalable joint path planning and control algorithm for multi-robot systems with constrained behaviours based on factor graph optimization. We demonstrate our algorithm on a series of hardware and simulated experiments. Our algorithm is consistently able to recover from disturbances and avoid obstacles while outperforming state-of-the-art methods in optimization time, path deviation, and inter-robot errors. See the code and supplementary video for experiments.
Comment: H. A. Jaafar, C. -H. Kao and S. Saeedi, "MR.CAP: Multi-Robot Joint Control and Planning for Object Transport," in IEEE Control Systems Letters, doi: 10.1109/LCSYS.2024.3349989