FPTAS for Polygonal Multi-Robot Motion Planning

Abstract:We study multi-robot motion planning in a polygonal environment with polygonal robots. The setting of the problem consists of a polygonal domain $\mathcal{W}$ with $n$ vertices and $k$ robots $R_1,\dots,R_k$ translating in $\mathcal{W}$ each of which is represented by a polygon of constant complexity. Given a source configuration $\mathbf{s}$ and a target configuration $\mathbf{t}$ of the robots in $\mathcal{W}$, the goal of the problem is to find a collision-free motion plan from $\mathbf{s}$ to $\mathbf{t}$ that is shortest with respect to some cost function. We present the first fully polynomial-time approximation schemes (FPTAS) for motion planning with any fixed number $k$ of robots, under the min-sum objective, the min-max objective, and the min-makespan objective. Here, the min-sum variant aims to minimize the total traveling distance of all robots, the min-max variant aims to minimize the maximum traveling distance of a single robot, and the min-makespan variant aims to minimize the total time cost under the assumption that all robots move with a maximum speed $1$. The algorithm directly generalizes to the problem in any fixed dimension $d$, with a polytope environment and polytope robots. Our result settles an open question of Agarwal, Halperin, Sharir, Steiger [SODA'24] and Agarwal, Holmgren, Steiger [SODA'26], who gave an FPTAS for $k=2$ unit-square robots and a bicriteria-approximation algorithm for a fixed number $k$ of unit-square or unit-disk robots, respectively. Compared to the previous results, our algorithm is substantially simpler.

Computational Geometry (cs.CG); Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS); Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.20244 [cs.CG]

(or arXiv:2610.20244v1 [cs.CG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.20244 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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