Research Thrusts

Main Thrusts

Our proposed research revolves around three main thrusts:

  1. Identify attack models specific to the scenarios considered, together with countermeasures based on measurements in the physical world;
  2. Develop abstraction and high-level planning algorithms that generate flexible plans that satisfy both the task specifications, and the additional security requirements;
  3. New low-level controllers that can negotiate the high-level plans with real-time objectives (such as obstacle avoidance) while allowing for collaboration between the agents. The proposed research includes an evaluation plan on a robotic testbed which includes camera-equipped ground and aerial vehicles, as well as short-throw projectors for creating augmented reality environments emulating our motivating applications.

ADMM Optimization for Multi-agent Path Planning with Spatio-Temporal Constraints

By Roberto TronJuly 14th, 2020

As part of Thrust 2 of our project, we study novel algorithms for multi-agent path planning for continuous environments with sound but incomplete detection guarantees but that can also pursue secondary optimization objectives.

We created a path planning method based on the continuous optimization Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM)  While ADMM is a well-studied algorithm from the optimization and machine learning literature). The resulting algorithm is very flexible, and can handle many different types of objectives and non-convex temporal-spatial constraints while allowing infeasible initializations. Although this approach can only ensure local convergence, when combined with a proper initialization, the algorithm empirically shows robust convergence.