Efficient Global Trajectory Planning for Multi-Robot System with Affinely Deformable Formation

Global trajectory planning is crucial for long- range formation navigation tasks of multi-robot systems in efficiency improvement and energy saving, whose main chal- lenges are the joint space constraints of the whole team and the long-range deployment. To overcome the above difficulties, we reformulate the original problem into an affine formation planning problem in parameter space. Further, we propose a front-end & back-end framework for global trajectory planning of Multi-Robot Systems (MRS) with affinely deformable forma- tion. For the front-end, an RL-steering affine formation RRT* method is designed to search a global formation-level trajectory in affine parameter space, combining the efficient BVP-solving capability of RL and the global guidance and generalizing ability of RRT*. For the back-end, we propose a formation- level affine parameter trajectory optimization method to refine the front-end trajectory, and further transform it into per- agent trajectories for execution. Extensive benchmarks and ablation experiments in simulation show the effectiveness of our framework for the global trajectory generation of a multi- UAV system with affinely deformable formation. The appendix can be seen here3.