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arXiv · 1302.2828

Multi-agent RRT*: Sampling-based Cooperative Pathfinding (Extended Abstract)

Michal Čáp·Peter Novák·Jiří Vokřínek·Michal Pěchouček
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Abstract

Cooperative pathfinding is a problem of finding a set of non-conflicting trajectories for a number of mobile agents. Its applications include planning for teams of mobile robots, such as autonomous aircrafts, cars, or underwater vehicles. The state-of-the-art algorithms for cooperative pathfinding typically rely on some heuristic forward-search pathfinding technique, where A* is often the algorithm of choice. Here, we propose MA-RRT*, a novel algorithm for multi-agent path planning that builds upon a recently proposed asymptotically-optimal sampling-based algorithm for finding single-agent shortest path called RRT*. We experimentally evaluate the performance of the algorithm and show that the sampling-based approach offers better scalability than the classical forward-search approach in relatively large, but sparse environments, which are typical in real-world applications such as multi-aircraft collision avoidance.

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Michal Čáp, Peter Novák, Jiří Vokřínek, Michal Pěchouček. 2013-02-12. Multi-agent RRT*: Sampling-based Cooperative Pathfinding (Extended Abstract). https://arxiv.org/abs/1302.2828

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