Asynchronous decentralized prioritized planning for coordination in multi-robot system

In this paper, the multi-robot motion coordination planning problem is addressed. Although a centralized prioritized planning strategy can be used to solve the problem, we rather consider a decentralized variant, which is a more suitable for a robotic system of cooperating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) due to communication limitations, privacy concerns, and a better exploitation of computational resources distributed among the individual robots. However, the existing decentralized prioritized planning algorithm contains synchronization points that all the agents must be able to pass synchronously, which is impractical and inefficient for a real-world deployment of the robotic systems. Therefore, we introduce a new asynchronous decentralized prioritized planning algorithm and show that the method can converge faster than both the synchronous decentralized and centralized algorithms. Further, we demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method as a coordination mechanism within a complex mission planning for a real robotic system consisting of several autonomous UAVs.