Publication

Z. Ren, C. Zhang, S. Rathinam and H. Choset. Search Algorithms for Multi-Agent Teamwise Cooperative Path Finding. In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages 1407-1413, 2023.

Abstract: Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) computes a set of collision-free paths for multiple agents from their respective starting locations to destinations. This work considers a generalization of MAPF called teamwise cooperative MAPF (TCMAPF), where agents are grouped as multiple teams and each team has its own objective to be minimized. An objective can be the sum or the max of individual arrival times of the agents. In general, there is more than one team, and TC-MAPF is thus a multi-objective planning problem with the goal of finding the entire Pareto-optimal front that represents all possible tradeoffs among the objectives of the teams. To solve TC-MAPF, we propose two algorithms TC-CBS and TC-M*, which leverage the existing CBS and M* for conventional MAPF. We discuss the conditions under which the proposed algorithms are complete and are guaranteed to find the Pareto-optimal front. We present numerical results for several types of TC-MAPF problems, and our approach can handle up to 20 agents within a time limit.

Download the paper in pdf.