Path Planning Games

TL;DR

This paper introduces a game-theoretic framework for path planning in robotics, balancing efficiency and safety, and highlights the trade-offs and potential safety compromises in strategic multi-agent scenarios.

Contribution

It presents a novel mathematical formulation for strategic path planning, including Nash equilibrium approximation and cooperative models, from an economic perspective.

Findings

Safety is often compromised in strategic path planning compared to cooperative solutions.

The framework effectively models the trade-off between efficiency and safety in multi-agent scenarios.

Case studies demonstrate the practical implications of the game-theoretic approach.

Abstract

Path planning is a fundamental and extensively explored problem in robotic control. We present a novel economic perspective on path planning. Specifically, we investigate strategic interactions among path planning agents using a game theoretic path planning framework. Our focus is on economic tension between two important objectives: efficiency in the agents' achieving their goals, and safety in navigating towards these. We begin by developing a novel mathematical formulation for path planning that trades off these objectives, when behavior of other agents is fixed. We then use this formulation for approximating Nash equilibria in path planning games, as well as to develop a multi-agent cooperative path planning formulation. Through several case studies, we show that in a path planning game, safety is often significantly compromised compared to a cooperative solution.