C-Nav: Distributed Coordination In Crowded Multi-Agent Navigation

In crowded multi-agent navigation, the motion of the agents is significantly constrained by the motion of the nearby agents. This makes planning paths very difficult and leads to inefficient global motion. To address this problem, we propose a distributed approach, which we call C-Nav, that introduces politeness into multi agent navigation. With our approach, agents take into account the velocities and goals of their neighbors and optimize their motion accordingly and in real-time. Further, we perform a theoretical analysis of the algorithm, and experimentally demonstrate its advantages in simulation, with hundreds of agents in a variety of scenarios, and in real world navigation tasks with several mobile robots. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.