Strategizing at Speed: A Learned Model Predictive Game for Multi-Agent Drone Racing

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Papuc, Andrei-Carlo, Peters, Lasse, Sun, Sihao, Ferranti, Laura, Alonso-Mora, Javier
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866914622556078080
author Papuc, Andrei-Carlo
Peters, Lasse
Sun, Sihao
Ferranti, Laura
Alonso-Mora, Javier
author_facet Papuc, Andrei-Carlo
Peters, Lasse
Sun, Sihao
Ferranti, Laura
Alonso-Mora, Javier
contents Autonomous drone racing pushes the boundaries of high-speed motion planning and multi-agent strategic decision-making. Success in this domain requires drones not only to navigate at their limits but also to anticipate and counteract competitors' actions. In this paper, we study a fundamental question that arises in this domain: how deeply should an agent strategize before taking an action? To this end, we compare two planning paradigms: the Model Predictive Game (MPG), which finds interaction-aware strategies at the expense of longer computation times, and contouring Model Predictive Control (MPC), which computes strategies rapidly but does not reason about interactions. We perform extensive experiments to study this trade-off, revealing that MPG outperforms MPC at moderate velocities but loses its advantage at higher speeds due to latency. To address this shortcoming, we propose a Learned Model Predictive Game (LMPG) approach that amortizes model predictive gameplay to reduce latency. In both simulation and hardware experiments, we benchmark our approach against MPG and MPC in head-to-head races, finding that LMPG outperforms both baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_06925
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Strategizing at Speed: A Learned Model Predictive Game for Multi-Agent Drone Racing
Papuc, Andrei-Carlo
Peters, Lasse
Sun, Sihao
Ferranti, Laura
Alonso-Mora, Javier
Robotics
Computer Science and Game Theory
Autonomous drone racing pushes the boundaries of high-speed motion planning and multi-agent strategic decision-making. Success in this domain requires drones not only to navigate at their limits but also to anticipate and counteract competitors' actions. In this paper, we study a fundamental question that arises in this domain: how deeply should an agent strategize before taking an action? To this end, we compare two planning paradigms: the Model Predictive Game (MPG), which finds interaction-aware strategies at the expense of longer computation times, and contouring Model Predictive Control (MPC), which computes strategies rapidly but does not reason about interactions. We perform extensive experiments to study this trade-off, revealing that MPG outperforms MPC at moderate velocities but loses its advantage at higher speeds due to latency. To address this shortcoming, we propose a Learned Model Predictive Game (LMPG) approach that amortizes model predictive gameplay to reduce latency. In both simulation and hardware experiments, we benchmark our approach against MPG and MPC in head-to-head races, finding that LMPG outperforms both baselines.
title Strategizing at Speed: A Learned Model Predictive Game for Multi-Agent Drone Racing
topic Robotics
Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06925