Robust Sequential Path Planning Under Disturbances and Adversarial Intruder

Provably safe and scalable multi-vehicle path planning is an important and urgent problem due to the expected increase of automation in civilian airspace in the near future. Although this problem has been studied in the past, there has not been a method that guarantees both goal satisfaction and safety for vehicles with general nonlinear dynamics while taking into account disturbances and potential adversarial agents, to the best of our knowledge. Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability is the ideal tool for guaranteeing goal satisfaction and safety under such scenarios, and has been successfully applied to many small-scale problems. However, a direct application of HJ reachability in most cases becomes intractable when there are more than two vehicles due to the exponentially scaling computational complexity with respect to system dimension. In this paper, we take advantage of the guarantees HJ reachability provides, and eliminate the computation burden by assigning a strict priority ordering to the vehicles under consideration. Under this sequential path planning (SPP) scheme, vehicles reserve “space-time” portions in the airspace, and the space-time portions guarantee dynamic feasibility, collision avoidance, and optimality of the paths given the priority ordering. With a computation complexity that scales quadratically when accounting for both disturbances and an intruder, and linearly when accounting for only disturbances, SPP can tractably solve the multi-vehicle path planning problem for vehicles with general nonlinear dynamics in a practical setting. We demonstrate our theory in representative simulations.