Publication

R. Veerapaneni, H. K. A. Tang, Y. Cen, H. He, S. Zhao, V. Shah, Z. Ji, G. Olin, J. Arrizabalaga, Y. Shaoul, J. Li and M. Likhachev. Conflict-Based Search as a Protocol: A Multi-Agent Motion Planning Protocol for Heterogeneous Agents, Solvers, and Independent Tasks. In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2026.

Abstract: Imagine the future construction site, hospital, or office with dozens of robots bought from different manufacturers. How can we enable these different robots to effectively move in a shared environment, given that each robot may have its own independent motion planning system? This work shows how we can get efficient collision-free movements between algorithmically heterogeneous agents by using Conflict-Based Search (Sharon et al. 2015) as a protocol. At its core, the CBS Protocol requires one specific single-agent motion planning API; finding a collision-free path that satisfies certain space-time constraints. Given such an API, CBS uses a central planner to find collision-free paths - independent of how the API is implemented. We demonstrate how this protocol enables multi-agent motion planning for a heterogeneous team of agents completing independent tasks with a variety of single-agent planners including: Heuristic Search (e.g., A*), Sampling Based Search (e.g., RRT), Optimization (e.g., Direct Collocation), Diffusion, and Reinforcement Learning.

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