SPARC: Spatial-Aware Path Planning via Attentive Agent Communication

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Mu, Sayang, Wu, Xiangyu, An, Bo
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Mu, Sayang
Wu, Xiangyu
An, Bo
author_facet Mu, Sayang
Wu, Xiangyu
An, Bo
contents Efficient communication is critical for decentralized Multi-Robot Path Planning (MRPP), yet existing learned communication methods treat all neighboring robots equally regardless of their spatial proximity, leading to diluted attention in congested regions where coordination matters most. We propose Relation enhanced Multi Head Attention (RMHA), a communication mechanism that explicitly embeds pairwise Manhattan distances into the attention weight computation, enabling each robot to dynamically prioritize messages from spatially relevant neighbors. Combined with a distance-constrained attention mask and GRU gated message fusion, RMHA integrates seamlessly with MAPPO for stable end-to-end training. In zero-shot generalization from 8 training robots to 128 test robots on 40x40 grids, RMHA achieves approximately 75 percent success rate at 30 percent obstacle density outperforming the best baseline by over 25 percentage points. Ablation studies confirm that distance-relation encoding is the key contributor to success rate improvement in high-density environments. Index Terms-Multi-robot path planning, graph attention mechanism, multi-head attention, communication optimization, cooperative decision-making
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_02845
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SPARC: Spatial-Aware Path Planning via Attentive Agent Communication
Mu, Sayang
Wu, Xiangyu
An, Bo
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Efficient communication is critical for decentralized Multi-Robot Path Planning (MRPP), yet existing learned communication methods treat all neighboring robots equally regardless of their spatial proximity, leading to diluted attention in congested regions where coordination matters most. We propose Relation enhanced Multi Head Attention (RMHA), a communication mechanism that explicitly embeds pairwise Manhattan distances into the attention weight computation, enabling each robot to dynamically prioritize messages from spatially relevant neighbors. Combined with a distance-constrained attention mask and GRU gated message fusion, RMHA integrates seamlessly with MAPPO for stable end-to-end training. In zero-shot generalization from 8 training robots to 128 test robots on 40x40 grids, RMHA achieves approximately 75 percent success rate at 30 percent obstacle density outperforming the best baseline by over 25 percentage points. Ablation studies confirm that distance-relation encoding is the key contributor to success rate improvement in high-density environments. Index Terms-Multi-robot path planning, graph attention mechanism, multi-head attention, communication optimization, cooperative decision-making
title SPARC: Spatial-Aware Path Planning via Attentive Agent Communication
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02845