Cooperative Path Planning of Dynamical Multi-Agent Systems Using Differential Flatness Approach

This paper discusses a design methodology of cooperative path planning for dynamical multi-agent systems with spatial and temporal constraints. The cooperative behavior of the multi-agent systems is specified in terms of the objective function in an optimization formulation. The path of achieving cooperative tasks is then generated by the optimization formulation constructed based on a differential flatness approach. Three scenarios of multi-agent tasking are proposed at the cooperative task planning framework. Given agent dynamics, both spatial and temporal constraints are considered in the path planning. The path planning algorithm first finds trajectory curves in a lower-dimensional space and then parameterizes the curves by a set of B-spline representations. The coefficients of the B-spline curves are further solved by a sequential quadratic programming solver to achieve the optimization objective and satisfy these constraints. Finally, several illustrative examples of cooperative path/task planning are presented.