Multi-Agent Robot Motion Planning for Rendezvous Applications in a Mixed Environment with a Broadcast Event-Triggered Consensus Controller

Abstract

Finding consensus is one of the most important tasks in multi-agent robot motion coordination research, especially in a communication environment. This justification underlies the use of event-triggered controller in current multi-agent consensus research. However, the communication issue has not been adequately addressed in a broadcast communication environment for rendezvous applications. Therefore, the broadcast event-triggered (BET) controller with a new formulation was designed using the Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Algorithm (SPSA). Theorems and relevant proofs were presented. Agent performances with the BET controller were evaluated and compared with the conventional broadcast time-triggered (BTT) controller. The results showed an effective motion generated by a multi-agent robot to reach the rendezvous point based on the Bernoulli distribution and gradient approximation of the agent local controller. The BET controller has proven to work more efficiently than the BTT controller when it reaches convergence in less than 40.42% of time and 21.00% of iterations on average. The utilization of communication channels is slightly reduced for BET, which is 71.09% usage instead of fully utilized by BTT. The threshold value of the event-triggered function (ETF) and SPSA parameters affected agent performances. Future research may consider using an effective and efficient BET controller in a complex communication environment with many variations of graph topology networks.