Effective Game-Theoretic Motion Planning via Nested Search

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Engle, Avishav, Zhitnikov, Andrey, Salzman, Oren, Ben-Porat, Omer, Solovey, Kiril
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Engle, Avishav
Zhitnikov, Andrey
Salzman, Oren
Ben-Porat, Omer
Solovey, Kiril
author_facet Engle, Avishav
Zhitnikov, Andrey
Salzman, Oren
Ben-Porat, Omer
Solovey, Kiril
contents To facilitate effective, safe deployment in the real world, individual robots must reason about interactions with other agents, which often occur without explicit communication. Recent work has identified game theory, particularly the concept of Nash Equilibrium (NE), as a key enabler for behavior-aware decision-making. Yet, existing work falls short of fully unleashing the power of game-theoretic reasoning. Specifically, popular optimization-based methods require simplified robot dynamics and tend to get trapped in local minima due to convexification. Other works that rely on payoff matrices suffer from poor scalability due to the explicit enumeration of all possible trajectories. To bridge this gap, we introduce Game-Theoretic Nested Search (GTNS), a novel, scalable, and provably correct approach for computing NEs in general dynamical systems. GTNS efficiently searches the action space of all agents involved, while discarding trajectories that violate the NE constraint (no unilateral deviation) through an inner search over a lower-dimensional space. Our algorithm enables explicit selection among equilibria by utilizing a user-specified global objective, thereby capturing a rich set of realistic interactions. We demonstrate the approach on a variety of autonomous driving and racing scenarios where we achieve solutions in mere seconds on commodity hardware.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_08001
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Effective Game-Theoretic Motion Planning via Nested Search
Engle, Avishav
Zhitnikov, Andrey
Salzman, Oren
Ben-Porat, Omer
Solovey, Kiril
Robotics
Multiagent Systems
To facilitate effective, safe deployment in the real world, individual robots must reason about interactions with other agents, which often occur without explicit communication. Recent work has identified game theory, particularly the concept of Nash Equilibrium (NE), as a key enabler for behavior-aware decision-making. Yet, existing work falls short of fully unleashing the power of game-theoretic reasoning. Specifically, popular optimization-based methods require simplified robot dynamics and tend to get trapped in local minima due to convexification. Other works that rely on payoff matrices suffer from poor scalability due to the explicit enumeration of all possible trajectories. To bridge this gap, we introduce Game-Theoretic Nested Search (GTNS), a novel, scalable, and provably correct approach for computing NEs in general dynamical systems. GTNS efficiently searches the action space of all agents involved, while discarding trajectories that violate the NE constraint (no unilateral deviation) through an inner search over a lower-dimensional space. Our algorithm enables explicit selection among equilibria by utilizing a user-specified global objective, thereby capturing a rich set of realistic interactions. We demonstrate the approach on a variety of autonomous driving and racing scenarios where we achieve solutions in mere seconds on commodity hardware.
title Effective Game-Theoretic Motion Planning via Nested Search
topic Robotics
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08001