Multi-robot Path Planning in Well-formed Infrastructures: Prioritized Planning vs. Prioritized Wait Adjustment (Preliminary Results)

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast algorithm for multi-robot path planning in well-structured environments that transforms egocentric paths into collision-free trajectories, offering significant speed improvements with some increase in solution cost.

Contribution

It presents a novel, empirically evaluated method for converting individual robot paths into collision-free trajectories, outperforming existing algorithms in speed.

Findings

Algorithm is up to ten times faster than state-of-the-art methods.

Solution cost increases notably compared to traditional approaches.

Empirical evaluation demonstrates practical efficiency gains.

Abstract

We study the problem of planning collision-free paths for a group of homogeneous robots. We propose a novel approach for turning the paths that were planned egocentrically by the robots, e.g. without taking other robots' moves into account, into collision-free trajectories and evaluate it empirically. Suggested algorithm is much faster (up to one order of magnitude) than state-of-the-art but this comes at the price of notable drop-down of the solution cost.