Robust MADER: Decentralized and Asynchronous Multiagent Trajectory Planner Robust to Communication Delay

Abstract: Although communication delays can disrupt multiagent systems, most of the existing multiagent trajectory planners lack a strategy to address this issue. State-of-the-art approaches typically assume perfect communication environments, which is hardly realistic in real-world experiments. This paper presents Robust MADER (RMADER), a decentralized and asynchronous multiagent trajectory planner that can handle communication delays among agents. By broadcasting both the newly optimized trajectory and the committed trajectory, and by performing a delay check step, RMADER is able to guarantee safety even under communication delay. RMADER was validated through extensive simulation and hardware flight experiments and achieved a 100% success rate of collision-free trajectory generation, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches.