Hybrid Centralized Distributed Control for Lifelong MAPF over Wireless Connections

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid control scheme for lifelong multi-agent pathfinding that combines centralized cloud policies with onboard fallback controllers to handle unreliable wireless communication.

Contribution

It presents a novel joint control-communication framework that couples communication scheduling with policy learning for robust multi-agent coordination.

Findings

Effective handling of unreliable wireless links in MAPF scenarios

Reduced communication overhead through residual corrections

Improved safety and robustness in multi-agent pathfinding

Abstract

In lifelong multi-agent path finding (MAPF) with many robots, unreliable wireless links and stochastic executions are the norm. Existing approaches typically either rely on centralized planning under idealized communication, or run fully distributed local controllers with fixed communication patterns; they rarely couple communication scheduling with policy learning, and thus struggle when bandwidth is scarce or packets are frequently dropped. We address this joint control--communication problem and propose a hybrid centralized--distributed scheme: a centralized cloud policy sends small residual corrections only when selected, while a lightweight on-board Gated recurrent unit (GRU) policy provides a safe default fallback when wireless connection is not available.