Prof.Zhongkui Li

Speech Title:

Multi-Robot Trajectory Planning: Deadlock, Heterogeneity, and Asynchrony

Abstract:

Online collision-free trajectory generation within a shared workspace is fundamental for most multi-robot applications. Distributed planning without a central coordinator is not only desirable and but necessitated, especially for large-scale scenarios, which however usually suffers from deadlocks (several robots block each other indefinitely), is restricted to homogeneous robot dynamics, and requires synchronized replanning. In this lecture, we will first present a novel method called infinite-horizon model predictive control with deadlock resolution. We show that the condition of deadlocks is analogous to a force equilibrium and put forward an adaptive resolution scheme, which, different from other existing heuristic methods, can provably avoid deadlocks. Then, we introduce an asynchronous spatial allocation protocol, which, by assigning feasible temporal space to and updates planning via reaching agreement between adjacent nodes, can concurrently generate trajectories for heterogeneous robots (including double integrators, unicycles, and bicycles) according to their own timetable without requiring global clock synchronization. Comparisons with baseline methods via numerical simulations and hardware experiments are also given.

Bio of lecturer:

Dr. Zhongkui Li received the B.S. degree from the National University of Defense Technology, China, in 2005, and his Ph.D. degree from Peking University, China, in 2010. Since 2013, he has been with College of Engineering, Peking University, China, where he is currently a tenured Associate Professor. He has published two monographs and a number of journal papers. His current research interests include multi-agent systems, cooperative control, motion and task planning. Dr. Li was the recipient of the State Natural Science Award of China in 2015, the Natural Science Award of the Ministry of Education of China in 2022 and 2011, and the National Excellent Doctoral Thesis Award of China in 2012. His coauthored papers received the IET Control Theory & Applications Premium Award in 2013 and the Best Paper Award of Journal of Systems Science & Complexity in 2012. He serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and several other journals.

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