Intelligent Planning for Large-Scale Multi-Robot Coordination

Robots will play a crucial role in the future and need to work as a team in increasingly more complex applications. Advances in robotics have laid the hardware foundations for building large-scale multi-robot systems. But how to coordinate robots intelligently is a difficult problem. We believe that graph-search-based planning can systematically exploit the combinatorial structure of multi-robot coordination problems and efficiently generate solutions with rigorous guarantees on correctness, completeness, and solution quality. We started with one problem that is central to many multi-robot applications. Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is an NP-hard problem of planning collision-free paths for a team of agents while minimizing their travel times. We addressed the MAPF problem from both (1) a theoretical perspective by developing efficient algorithms to solve large MAPF instances with completeness and optimality guarantees via a variety of AI and optimization technologies, such as constraint reasoning, heuristic search, stochastic local search, and machine learning, and (2) an applicational perspective by developing algorithmic techniques for integrating MAPF with task planning and execution for various multi-robot systems, such as mobile robot coordination, traffic management, drone swarm control, multi-arm assembly, and character control in video games. This paper is part of the AAAI-23 New Faculty Highlights.