Towards Decentralized Waypoint Negotiation

Cooperative multi-agent path planning around a common location has many applications, and has received significant attention from the research community. Our research is motivated by the need for groups of autonomous vehicles or mobile robots to collaboratively plan efficient paths around shared navigational coordinates (waypoints) in a distributed and decentralized manner. Our ongoing research is focused on creating a distributed solution to Dresner and Stone’s Autonomous Intersection Management problem. In the future we plan to relax the constraints of this problem, and allow more flexibility in the angles of approach and departure from a single waypoint, and also plan to consider efficient group plans for multi-waypoint routes. In this paper we briefly introduce intersection management, present preliminary results for an unstructured peer-to-peer approach to the problem, and discuss future research directions.