Multi-vehicle formation control based on branch-and-bound method compatible with collision avoidance problem

This paper presents a new branch-and-bound (B&B) method to reduce the computational burden of online optimization in multi-vehicle formation control with collision avoidance that is formulated by model predictive control. One of the possible reasons for extremely heavy computation time of the standard B&B algorithm is that so many subproblems are generated since integer constraints are rarely satisfied in "relaxed" problems. The purpose of the proposed method is to decrease subproblems based on a new branching rule taking into account the inherent properties of collision avoidance problems. Numerical examples and experiments show that the proposed method drastically reduces computation time of online optimization for multi-vehicle formation control.