Jinmingwu Jiang

Jinmingwu Jiang, Kaigui Wu, Haiyang Liu et al.

Cooperative path-finding in multi-agent systems demands scalable solutions to navigate agents from their origins to destinations without conflict. Despite the breadth of research, scalability remains hampered by increased computational demands in complex environments. This study introduces the multi-agent RRT* potential field (MA-RRT*PF), an innovative algorithm that addresses computational efficiency and path-finding efficacy in dense scenarios. MA-RRT*PF integrates a dynamic potential field with a heuristic method, advancing obstacle avoidance and optimizing the expansion of random trees in congested spaces. The empirical evaluations highlight MA-RRT*PF's significant superiority over conventional multi-agent RRT* (MA-RRT*) in dense environments, offering enhanced performance and solution quality without compromising integrity. This work not only contributes a novel approach to the field of cooperative multi-agent path-finding but also offers a new perspective for practical applications in densely populated settings where traditional methods are less effective.

Jinmingwu Jiang, Kaigui Wu

In cooperative pathfinding problems, no-conflicts paths that bring several agents from their start location to their destination need to be planned. This problem can be efficiently solved by Multi-agent RRT*(MA-RRT*) algorithm, which is still state-of-the-art in the field of coupled methods. However, the implementation of this algorithm is hindered in systems with limited memory because the number of nodes in the tree grows indefinitely as the paths get optimized. This paper proposes an improved version of MA-RRT*, called Multi-agent RRT* Fixed Node(MA-RRT*FN), which limits the number of nodes stored in the tree by removing the weak nodes on the path which are not likely to reach the goal. The results show that MA-RRT*FN performs close to MA-RRT* in terms of scalability and solution quality while the memory required is much lower and fixed.