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Graph Neural Networks for Decentralized Multi-Robot Path Planning

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Conference Object

Change log

Authors

Li, Qingbiao 
Gama, Fernando 
Ribeiro, Alejandro 

Abstract

Effective communication is key to successful, de- centralized, multi-robot path planning. Yet, it is far from obvious what information is crucial to the task at hand, and how and when it must be shared among robots. To side-step these issues and move beyond hand-crafted heuristics, we propose a combined model that automatically synthesizes local communication and decision-making policies for robots navigating in constrained workspaces. Our architecture is composed of a convolutional neural network (CNN) that extracts adequate features from local observations, and a graph neural network (GNN) that communicates these features among robots. We train the model to imitate an expert algorithm, and use the resulting model online in decentralized planning involving only local communication and local observations. We evaluate our method in simulations by navigating teams of robots to their destinations in 2D cluttered workspaces. We measure the success rates and sum of costs over the planned paths. The results show a performance close to that of our expert algorithm, demonstrating the validity of our approach. In particular, we show our model’s capability to generalize to previously unseen cases (involving larger environments and larger robot teams).

Description

Keywords

cs.RO, cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.MA

Journal Title

2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

Conference Name

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems

Journal ISSN

2153-0858
2153-0866

Volume Title

Publisher

IEEE

Rights

All rights reserved
Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/S015493/1)
We gratefully acknowledge the support of ARL grant DCIST CRA W911NF-17-2-0181. A. Prorok was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (grant EP/S015493/1). We gratefully acknowledge their support.