GIANT - Global Path Integration and Attentive Graph Networks for Multi-Agent Trajectory Planning

TL;DR

A local navigation model is introduced that leverages pre-planned global paths, allowing robots to adhere to optimal routes while dynamically adjusting to environmental changes, resulting in superior performance in complex, dynamic environments.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to multi-robot collision avoidance that integrates global path planning with local navigation strategies, utilizing attentive graph neural networks to manage dynamic interactions among agents. We introduce a local navigation model that leverages pre-planned global paths, allowing robots to adhere to optimal routes while dynamically adjusting to environmental changes. The models robustness is enhanced through the introduction of noise during training, resulting in superior performance in complex, dynamic environments. Our approach is evaluated against established baselines, including NH-ORCA, DRL-NAV, and GA3C-CADRL, across various structurally diverse simulated scenarios. The results demonstrate that our model achieves consistently higher success rates, lower collision rates, and more efficient navigation, particularly in challenging scenarios where baseline models struggle. This work offers an advancement in multi-robot navigation, with implications for robust performance in complex, dynamic environments with varying degrees of complexity, such as those encountered in logistics, where adaptability is essential for accommodating unforeseen obstacles and unpredictable changes.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: The figure illustrates the trajectory chosen by our model, where the robot navigates through highly dense and dynamic environments while adhering to the global path
• Figure 2: Overall illustration of the observation space. (a) Illustrates the environmental obstacles captured by the LiDAR, the velocity of the agent, and the goal distance. (b) Illustrates the global path observations, with the distance from the agent (red) to the target point (blue), the angle difference between the agent heading and the target point, and the direction of the global path at the target point. (c) Illustrates the estimated dynamic clusters extracted from the LiDAR. The position and velocity of each cluster are tracked over time and fed to the network as a graph.
• Figure 3: An illustration of the actor-network architecture. The network includes three observation encoders: a static LiDAR encoder that processes the current frame through Conv1D layers to capture static features, a temporal LiDAR encoder that processes the last three frames through Conv1D layers to learn dynamic features, and a neighbor attentive Graph Neural Network encoder. The combined encoded features are passed to fully connected layers and the network outputs the mean and standard deviation for the action normal distributions, which include linear and angular velocities. The critic network follows an identical structure but outputs state values instead.
• Figure 4: The six different environments used during training.