Generalizability of Graph Neural Networks for Decentralized Unlabeled Motion Planning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Muthusamy, Shreyas, Owerko, Damian, Kanatsoulis, Charilaos I., Agarwal, Saurav, Ribeiro, Alejandro
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Muthusamy, Shreyas
Owerko, Damian
Kanatsoulis, Charilaos I.
Agarwal, Saurav
Ribeiro, Alejandro
author_facet Muthusamy, Shreyas
Owerko, Damian
Kanatsoulis, Charilaos I.
Agarwal, Saurav
Ribeiro, Alejandro
contents Unlabeled motion planning involves assigning a set of robots to target locations while ensuring collision avoidance, aiming to minimize the total distance traveled. The problem forms an essential building block for multi-robot systems in applications such as exploration, surveillance, and transportation. We address this problem in a decentralized setting where each robot knows only the positions of its $k$-nearest robots and $k$-nearest targets. This scenario combines elements of combinatorial assignment and continuous-space motion planning, posing significant scalability challenges for traditional centralized approaches. To overcome these challenges, we propose a decentralized policy learned via a Graph Neural Network (GNN). The GNN enables robots to determine (1) what information to communicate to neighbors and (2) how to integrate received information with local observations for decision-making. We train the GNN using imitation learning with the centralized Hungarian algorithm as the expert policy, and further fine-tune it using reinforcement learning to avoid collisions and enhance performance. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate the scalability and effectiveness of our approach. The GNN policy trained on 100 robots generalizes to scenarios with up to 500 robots, outperforming state-of-the-art solutions by 8.6\% on average and significantly surpassing greedy decentralized methods. This work lays the foundation for solving multi-robot coordination problems in settings where scalability is important.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_19829
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generalizability of Graph Neural Networks for Decentralized Unlabeled Motion Planning
Muthusamy, Shreyas
Owerko, Damian
Kanatsoulis, Charilaos I.
Agarwal, Saurav
Ribeiro, Alejandro
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Systems and Control
Unlabeled motion planning involves assigning a set of robots to target locations while ensuring collision avoidance, aiming to minimize the total distance traveled. The problem forms an essential building block for multi-robot systems in applications such as exploration, surveillance, and transportation. We address this problem in a decentralized setting where each robot knows only the positions of its $k$-nearest robots and $k$-nearest targets. This scenario combines elements of combinatorial assignment and continuous-space motion planning, posing significant scalability challenges for traditional centralized approaches. To overcome these challenges, we propose a decentralized policy learned via a Graph Neural Network (GNN). The GNN enables robots to determine (1) what information to communicate to neighbors and (2) how to integrate received information with local observations for decision-making. We train the GNN using imitation learning with the centralized Hungarian algorithm as the expert policy, and further fine-tune it using reinforcement learning to avoid collisions and enhance performance. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate the scalability and effectiveness of our approach. The GNN policy trained on 100 robots generalizes to scenarios with up to 500 robots, outperforming state-of-the-art solutions by 8.6\% on average and significantly surpassing greedy decentralized methods. This work lays the foundation for solving multi-robot coordination problems in settings where scalability is important.
title Generalizability of Graph Neural Networks for Decentralized Unlabeled Motion Planning
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.19829