Efficient Multi-Robot Motion Planning with Precomputed Translation-Invariant Edge Bundles

TL;DR

This paper introduces KiTE-Extend, a precomputed library-based mechanism that enhances multi-robot motion planning efficiency and scalability across various paradigms without altering existing planner guarantees.

Contribution

It presents a novel, planner-agnostic action selection method using offline trajectory segments to improve multi-robot motion planning performance.

Findings

KiTE-Extend reduces planning time in multi-robot scenarios.

It significantly improves scalability in multi-agent motion planning.

The method benefits centralized, prioritized, and conflict-based planning paradigms.

Abstract

Solving multi-robot motion planning (MRMP) requires generating collision-free kinodynamically feasible trajectories for multiple interacting robots. We introduce Kinodynamic Translation-Invariant Edge Bundles or KiTE-Extend, a planner-agnostic action selection mechanism for sampling-based kinodynamic motion planning. KiTE-Extend uses a library of trajectory segments computed offline to guide action selection during online planning, improving the ability of existing planners to identify feasible motion segments without altering state propagation, collision checking, or cost evaluation, and without changing their theoretical guarantees. While KiTE-Extend can modestly improve single-agent planners, its benefits are most clear in the multi-agent setting, where it is able to explore more effectively and significantly improve planning through the dense spatiotemporal constraints introduced by robot-robot interaction. Through experiments on multiple kinodynamic systems and environments, we show that KiTE-Extend reduces planning time and improves scalability across the three most common MRMP paradigms: centralized, prioritized, and conflict-based.