Adaptive Robot Coordination: A Subproblem-based Approach for Hybrid Multi-Robot Motion Planning

This work presents Adaptive Robot Coordination (ARC), a novel hybrid framework for multi-robot motion planning (MRMP) that employs local subproblems to resolve inter-robot conflicts. ARC creates subproblems centered around conflicts, and the solutions represent the robot motions required to resolve these conflicts. The use of subproblems enables an inexpensive hybrid exploration of the multi-robot planning space. ARC leverages the hybrid exploration by dynamically adjusting the coupling and decoupling of the multi-robot planning space. This allows ARC to adapt the levels of coordination efficiently by planning in decoupled spaces, where robots can operate independently, and in coupled spaces where coordination is essential. ARC is probabilistically complete, can be used for any robot, and produces efficient cost solutions in reduced planning times. Through extensive evaluation across representative scenarios with different robots requiring various levels of coordination, ARC demonstrates its ability to provide simultaneous scalability and precise coordination. ARC is the only method capable of solving all the scenarios and is competitive with coupled, decoupled, and hybrid baselines.

Roadmap-Optimal Multi-robot Motion Planning using Conflict-Based Search

Multi-Agent Pathfinding (MAPF) is the problem of finding a set of feasible paths for a set of agents with specific individual start and goal poses. It is considered computationally hard to solve. Conflict-based search (CBS) has shown optimality in developing solutions for multi-agent pathfinding problems in discrete spaces. However, neither CBS nor other discrete MAPF techniques can be directly applied to solve Multi-Agent Motion Planning (MAMP) problems, the continuous version on multi-agent pathfinding. In this work, we present the extension of the CBS discrete approach to solve Sampling-based Motion planning problems, and we show its capabilities to produce roadmap-optimal solutions for multi-robot motion planning problems.