Fault-Tolerant Offline Multi-Agent Path Planning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new offline multi-agent path planning framework that accounts for agent crashes, enabling reliable navigation despite failures through pre-planned paths and adaptive switching rules.

Contribution

It formalizes a novel fault-tolerant multi-agent path planning problem, analyzes its computational complexity, and proposes solutions for offline planning in crash-prone environments.

Findings

Formalization of the fault-tolerant path planning problem

Analysis of computational complexity

Proposed offline planning solutions

Abstract

We study a novel graph path planning problem for multiple agents that may crash at runtime, and block part of the workspace. In our setting, agents can detect neighboring crashed agents, and change followed paths at runtime. The objective is then to prepare a set of paths and switching rules for each agent, ensuring that all correct agents reach their destinations without collisions or deadlocks, despite unforeseen crashes of other agents. Such planning is attractive to build reliable multi-robot systems. We present problem formalization, theoretical analysis such as computational complexities, and how to solve this offline planning problem.