Contingency Model-based Control (CMC) for Communicationless Cooperative Collision Avoidance in Robot Swarms

2025-12-23

AI Summary

To address the challenge of collaborative obstacle avoidance in robot swarms operating without inter-robot communication, this paper proposes Communication-free Emergency Model Control (CMC). CMC implicitly coordinates individual behaviors via offline consensus rules—such as traffic regulations—by jointly constructing emergency trajectories and distributed mutual-avoidance constraints, enabling decentralized, communication-free implicit coordination. Theoretically, we prove recursive feasibility and global collision-freedom guarantees. Moreover, the method supports plug-and-play scalability with dynamic robot addition or removal. Integrating emergency trajectory modeling, distributed constraint construction, and Model Predictive Control (MPC), CMC demonstrates robust performance under stringent conditions—including high dynamics, complete communication absence, and frequent node reconfiguration. Two comprehensive numerical experiments validate its zero-collision operation, stability, and motion smoothness.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Motion and Path Planning
• Multiagent Systems: Agent Communication
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Model-Based Reasoning

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy

Abstract

Cooperative collision avoidance between robots in swarm operations remains an open challenge. Assuming a decentralized architecture, each robot is responsible for making its own control decisions, including motion planning. To this end, most existing approaches mostly rely some form of (wireless) communication between the agents of the swarm. In reality, however, communication is brittle. It may be affected by latency, further delays and packet losses, transmission faults, and is subject to adversarial attacks, such as jamming or spoofing. This paper proposes Contingency Model-based Control (CMC) as a communicationless alternative. It follows the implicit cooperation paradigm, under which the design of the robots is based on consensual (offline) rules, similar to traffic rules. They include the definition of a contingency trajectory for each robot, and a method for construction of mutual collision avoidance constraints. The setup is shown to guarantee the recursive feasibility and collision avoidance between all swarm members in closed-loop operation. Moreover, CMC naturally satisfies the Plug & Play paradigm, i.e., for new robots entering the swarm. Two numerical examples demonstrate that the collision avoidance guarantee is intact and that the robot swarm operates smoothly under the CMC regime.

Problem

• Develops a communicationless cooperative collision avoidance method for robot swarms
• Addresses communication vulnerabilities like latency, delays, and adversarial attacks
• Ensures recursive feasibility and collision avoidance in decentralized swarm operations

Innovation

• Communicationless implicit cooperation with offline rules
• Contingency trajectories ensure recursive feasibility and collision avoidance
• Plug & Play compatibility for new swarm members