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P. Surynek. Sparse Real-Time Decision Diagrams for Continuous Multi-Robot Path Planning. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI), pages 91-96, 2021.
Abstract: Multi-robot path planning (MRPP) is the task of finding non-conflicting paths for robots via which they can navigate themselves to specified individual goal positions. MRPP uses an undirected graph to represent a shared environment in which the robots move instantaneously between vertices in discrete time steps. Such discrete formulation enables relatively simple algorithms, often based on multi-valued decision diagrams (MDDs) that represent possible paths for each robot, but results in an inaccurate modeling of the real robotic task. Recently introduced continuous variant of MRPP assumes fixed trajectories for robots and fully continuous time but is more difficult to be addressed algorithmically. The set of possible paths for individual robots in the continuous variant can be represented in real-time decision diagram (RDD) which however is often too large. An improvement of RDDs based on sparsification that includes paths into RDD according to their heuristic prioritization is suggested in this short paper. We show that sparse RDDs can improve existing compilation-based algorithms significantly while keeping their optimality guarantees.