{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/distributed-heuristic-multi-agent-path","title":"Distributed Heuristic Multi-Agent Path Finding with Communication","arxiv_id":"2106.11365","date":"2021-06-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ziyuan Ma","Yudong Luo","Hang Ma"],"abstract":"Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is essential to large-scale robotic systems. Recent methods have applied reinforcement learning (RL) to learn decentralized polices in partially observable environments. A fundamental challenge of obtaining collision-free policy is that agents need to learn cooperation to handle congested situations. This paper combines communication with deep Q-learning to provide a novel learning based method for MAPF, where agents achieve cooperation via graph convolution. To guide RL algorithm on long-horizon goal-oriented tasks, we embed the potential choices of shortest paths from single source as heuristic guidance instead of using a specific path as in most existing works. Our method treats each agent independently and trains the model from a single agent's perspective. The final trained policy is applied to each agent for decentralized execution. The whole system is distributed during training and is trained under a curriculum learning strategy. Empirical evaluation in obstacle-rich environment indicates the high success rate with low average step of our method.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.11365v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.11365v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"distributed-heuristic-multi-agent-path","repo_url":"https://github.com/ZiyuanMa/DHC","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"multi-agent-path-finding","task_name":"Multi-Agent Path Finding"},{"task_slug":"q-learning","task_name":"Q-Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"q-learning","method_name":"Q-Learning"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}