AASS Seminar - Multi-Agent Pathfinding and Its Applications

The research centre AASS arranges a seminar with Sven Koenig, University of California, Irvine.

Remote attendance: https://oru-se.zoom.us/j/65096623293

Abstract

The coordination of robots and other agents is becoming increasingly important for industry. For example, on the order of one thousand robots navigate autonomously in Amazon fulfillment centers to move inventory pods all the way from their storage locations to the picking stations that need the products they store (and vice versa). Optimal and, in some cases, even approximately optimal path planning for these robots is NP-hard, yet one must find high-quality collision-free paths for them in real-time. Algorithms for such multi-agent path-finding problems had been studied in robotics and theoretical computer science for a long time but were insufficient since they are either fast but result in insufficient solution quality or result in good solution quality but are too slow. In this talk, I will discuss different variants of multi-agent path-finding problems and cool ideas for both solving them (in centralized and decentralized ways) and executing the resulting plans robustly. I will also discuss several applications of the technology (funded by NSF and Amazon Robotics), including warehousing, manufacturing, and train scheduling.

Bio

Most of Sven Koenig's research centers around techniques for decision-making that enable single situated agents (such as robots or decision-support systems) and teams of agents to act intelligently in their environments and exhibit goal-directed behavior in real-time, even if they have only incomplete knowledge of their environments, imperfect abilities to manipulate them, limited or noisy perception or insufficient reasoning speed. Additional information can be found on Sven's webpages: idm-lab.org.