POGEMA: A Benchmark Platform for Cooperative Multi-Agent Pathfinding
This provides a standardized evaluation tool for researchers in multi-agent systems, enabling fair comparisons across different approaches, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods.
The authors tackled the lack of a unified framework for comparing classical, learning-based, and hybrid methods in cooperative multi-agent pathfinding by introducing POGEMA, a benchmark platform with tools for learning, evaluation, and visualization, and presented comparison results involving various state-of-the-art methods.
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has recently excelled in solving challenging cooperative and competitive multi-agent problems in various environments, typically involving a small number of agents and full observability. Moreover, a range of crucial robotics-related tasks, such as multi-robot pathfinding, which have traditionally been approached with classical non-learnable methods (e.g., heuristic search), are now being suggested for solution using learning-based or hybrid methods. However, in this domain, it remains difficult, if not impossible, to conduct a fair comparison between classical, learning-based, and hybrid approaches due to the lack of a unified framework that supports both learning and evaluation. To address this, we introduce POGEMA, a comprehensive set of tools that includes a fast environment for learning, a problem instance generator, a collection of predefined problem instances, a visualization toolkit, and a benchmarking tool for automated evaluation. We also introduce and define an evaluation protocol that specifies a range of domain-related metrics, computed based on primary evaluation indicators (such as success rate and path length), enabling a fair multi-fold comparison. The results of this comparison, which involves a variety of state-of-the-art MARL, search-based, and hybrid methods, are presented.