Moving agents in formation in congested environments

Abstract

We study the Moving Agents in Formation problem, that combines the tasks of finding short collision-free paths for multiple agents and keeping them in close adherence to a desired formation. We develop a two-phase complete algorithm, called SWARM-MAPF, whose first phase is inspired by swarm-based algorithms (in open regions) and whose second phase is inspired by multi-agent path finding algorithms (in congested regions). Empirically, we show that SWARMMAPF scales well and finds close-to-optimal solutions.