Real-Time LaCAM for Real-Time MAPF

Abstract

The vast majority of Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) methods with completeness guarantees require planning full-horizon paths. However, planning full-horizon paths can take too long and be impractical in real-world applications. Instead, real-time planning and execution, which only allows the planner a finite amount of time before executing and replanning, is more practical for real-world multi-agent systems. Several methods utilize real-time planning schemes but none are provably complete, which leads to livelock or deadlock. Our main contribution is Real-Time LaCAM, the first Real-Time MAPF method with provable completeness guarantees. We do this by leveraging LaCAM in an incremental fashion. Our results show how we can iteratively plan for congested environments with a cutoff time of milliseconds while still maintaining the same success rate as full-horizon LaCAM. We also show how it can be used with a single-step learned MAPF policy.