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Main Authors: Natarajan, Ramkumar, Saleem, Muhammad Suhail, Xiao, William, Aine, Sandip, Choset, Howie, Likhachev, Maxim
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21637
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author Natarajan, Ramkumar
Saleem, Muhammad Suhail
Xiao, William
Aine, Sandip
Choset, Howie
Likhachev, Maxim
author_facet Natarajan, Ramkumar
Saleem, Muhammad Suhail
Xiao, William
Aine, Sandip
Choset, Howie
Likhachev, Maxim
contents Designing good heuristic functions for graph search requires adequate domain knowledge. It is often easy to design heuristics that perform well and correlate with the underlying true cost-to-go values in certain parts of the search space but these may not be admissible throughout the domain thereby affecting the optimality guarantees of the search. Bounded suboptimal search using several such partially good but inadmissible heuristics was developed in Multi-Heuristic A* (MHA*). Although MHA* leverages multiple inadmissible heuristics to potentially generate a faster suboptimal solution, the original version does not improve the solution over time. It is a one shot algorithm that requires careful setting of inflation factors to obtain a desired one time solution. In this work, we tackle this issue by extending MHA* to an anytime version that finds a feasible suboptimal solution quickly and continually improves it until time runs out. Our work is inspired from the Anytime Repairing A* (ARA*) algorithm. We prove that our precise adaptation of ARA* concepts in the MHA* framework preserves the original suboptimal and completeness guarantees and enhances MHA* to perform in an anytime fashion. Furthermore, we report the performance of A-MHA* in 3-D path planning domain and sliding tiles puzzle and compare against MHA* and other anytime algorithms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_21637
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A-MHA*: Anytime Multi-Heuristic A*
Natarajan, Ramkumar
Saleem, Muhammad Suhail
Xiao, William
Aine, Sandip
Choset, Howie
Likhachev, Maxim
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
Designing good heuristic functions for graph search requires adequate domain knowledge. It is often easy to design heuristics that perform well and correlate with the underlying true cost-to-go values in certain parts of the search space but these may not be admissible throughout the domain thereby affecting the optimality guarantees of the search. Bounded suboptimal search using several such partially good but inadmissible heuristics was developed in Multi-Heuristic A* (MHA*). Although MHA* leverages multiple inadmissible heuristics to potentially generate a faster suboptimal solution, the original version does not improve the solution over time. It is a one shot algorithm that requires careful setting of inflation factors to obtain a desired one time solution. In this work, we tackle this issue by extending MHA* to an anytime version that finds a feasible suboptimal solution quickly and continually improves it until time runs out. Our work is inspired from the Anytime Repairing A* (ARA*) algorithm. We prove that our precise adaptation of ARA* concepts in the MHA* framework preserves the original suboptimal and completeness guarantees and enhances MHA* to perform in an anytime fashion. Furthermore, we report the performance of A-MHA* in 3-D path planning domain and sliding tiles puzzle and compare against MHA* and other anytime algorithms.
title A-MHA*: Anytime Multi-Heuristic A*
topic Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21637