Loosely Synchronized Search for Multi-agent Path Finding with Asynchronous Actions

03/08/2021
by   Zhongqiang Ren, et al.
6

Multi-agent path finding (MAPF) determines an ensemble of collision-free paths for multiple agents between their respective start and goal locations. Among the available MAPF planners for workspaces modeled as a graph, A*-based approaches have been widely investigated and have demonstrated their efficiency in numerous scenarios. However, almost all of these A*-based approaches assume that each agent executes an action concurrently in that all agents start and stop together. This article presents a natural generalization of MAPF with asynchronous actions where agents do not necessarily start and stop concurrently. The main contribution of the work is a proposed approach called Loosely Synchronized Search (LSS) that extends A*-based MAPF planners to handle asynchronous actions. We show LSS is complete and finds an optimal solution if one exists. We also combine LSS with other existing MAPF methods that aims to trade-off optimality for computational efficiency. Extensive numerical results are presented to corroborate the performance of the proposed approaches. Finally, we also verify the applicability of our method in the Robotarium, a remotely accessible swarm robotics research platform.

READ FULL TEXT
research
02/08/2022

Optimal Multi-Agent Path Finding for Precedence Constrained Planning Tasks

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is the problem of finding collision-free...
research
03/18/2021

MS*: A New Exact Algorithm for Multi-agent Simultaneous Multi-goal Sequencing and Path Finding

In multi-agent applications such as surveillance and logistics, fleets o...
research
09/29/2021

Subdimensional Expansion Using Attention-Based Learning For Multi-Agent Path Finding

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) finds conflict-free paths for multiple a...
research
06/03/2021

Decentralised Approach for Multi Agent Path Finding

Multi Agent Path Finding (MAPF) requires identification of conflict free...
research
10/08/2019

MAMS-A*: Multi-Agent Multi-Scale A*

We present a multi-scale forward search algorithm for distributed agents...
research
05/21/2019

Position Paper: From Multi-Agent Pathfinding to Pipe Routing

The 2D Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) problem aims at finding collision...
research
06/25/2020

Asynchronous Multi Agent Active Search

Active search refers to the problem of efficiently locating targets in a...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset