Prioritized SIPP for Multi-Agent Path Finding With Kinematic Constraints

Abstract: Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is a long-standing problem in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence in which one needs to find a set of collision-free paths for a group of mobile agents (robots) operating in the shared workspace. Due to its importance, the problem is well-studied and multiple optimal and approximate algorithms are known. However, many of them abstract away from the kinematic constraints and assume that the agents can accelerate/decelerate instantaneously. This complicates the application of the algorithms on the real robots. In this paper, we present a method that mitigates this issue to a certain extent. The suggested solver is essentially, a prioritized planner based on the well-known Safe Interval Path Planning (SIPP) algorithm. Within SIPP we explicitly reason about the speed and the acceleration thus the constructed plans directly take kinematic constraints of agents into account. We suggest a range of heuristic functions for that setting and conduct a thorough empirical evaluation of the suggested algorithm.