Back to the Future: Efficient, Time-Consistent Solutions in Reach-Avoid Games
This work addresses safety-critical optimal control for mobile robots, offering an incremental improvement by ensuring time-consistency in multi-agent interactions.
The paper tackles the problem of finding time-consistent solutions in multi-agent reach-avoid games, which are used for safety-critical robot motion planning, and presents an efficient algorithm that provides safe control strategies in simulated driving scenarios.
We study the class of reach-avoid dynamic games in which multiple agents interact noncooperatively, and each wishes to satisfy a distinct target criterion while avoiding a failure criterion. Reach-avoid games are commonly used to express safety-critical optimal control problems found in mobile robot motion planning. Here, we focus on finding time-consistent solutions, in which future motion plans remain optimal even when a robot diverges from the plan early on due to, e.g., intrinsic dynamic uncertainty or extrinsic environment disturbances. Our main contribution is a computationally-efficient algorithm for multi-agent reach-avoid games which renders time-consistent solutions for all players. We demonstrate our approach in two- and three-player simulated driving scenarios, in which our method provides safe control strategies for all agents.