Multi-agent path planning is a critical challenge in robotics, requiring agents to navigate complex environments while avoiding collisions and optimizing travel efficiency. This work addresses the limitations of existing approaches by combining Gaussian belief propagation with path integration and introducing a novel tracking factor to ensure strict adherence to global paths. The proposed method is tested with two different global path-planning approaches: rapidly exploring random trees and a structured planner, which leverages predefined lane structures to improve coordination. A simulation environment was developed to validate the proposed method across diverse scenarios, each posing unique challenges in navigation and communication. Simulation results demonstrate that the tracking factor reduces path deviation by 28% in single-agent and 16% in multi-agent scenarios, highlighting its effectiveness in improving multi-agent coordination, especially when combined with structured global planning.

This paper presents a novel approach to multi-robot collision avoidance that integrates global path planning with local navigation strategies, utilizing attentive graph neural networks to manage dynamic interactions among agents. We introduce a local navigation model that leverages pre-planned global paths, allowing robots to adhere to optimal routes while dynamically adjusting to environmental changes. The model’s robustness is enhanced through the introduction of noise during training, resulting in superior performance in complex, dynamic environments. Our approach is evaluated against established baselines, including NH-ORCA, DRL-NAV, and GA3C-CADRL, across various structurally diverse simulated scenarios. The results demonstrate that our model achieves consistently higher success rates, lower collision rates, and more efficient navigation, particularly in challenging scenarios where baseline models struggle. This work offers an advancement in multi-robot navigation, with implications for robust performance in complex, dynamic environments with varying degrees of complexity, such as those encountered in logistics, where adaptability is essential for accommodating unforeseen obstacles and unpredictable changes.

This paper presents MIMIR-UW, a multipurpose underwater synthetic dataset for SLAM, depth estimation, and object segmentation to bridge the gap between theory and application in underwater environments. MIMIR-UW integrates three camera sensors, inertial measurements, and ground truth for robot pose, image depth, and object segmentation. The underwater robot is deployed within a pipe exploration scenario, carrying artificial lights that create uneven lighting, in addition to natural artefacts such as reflections from natural light and backscattering effects. Four environments totalling eleven tracks are provided, with various difficulties regarding light conditions or dynamic elements. Two metrics for dataset evaluation are proposed, allowing MIMIR-UW to be compared with other datasets. State-of-art methods on SLAM, segmentation and depth estimation are deployed and benchmarked on MIMIR-UW. Moreover, the dataset's potential for sim-to-real transfer is demonstrated by leveraging the segmentation and depth estimation models trained on MIMIR-UW in a real pipeline inspection scenario. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first underwater dataset targeted for such a variety of methods. The dataset is publicly available online. https://github.com/remaro-network/MIMIR-UW/

This study presents the conflict-aware multi-agent estimated time of arrival (CAMETA) framework, a novel approach for predicting the arrival times of multiple agents in unstructured environments without predefined road infrastructure. The CAMETA framework consists of three components: a path planning layer generating potential path suggestions, a multi-agent ETA prediction layer predicting the arrival times for all agents based on the paths, and lastly, a path selection layer that calculates the accumulated cost and selects the best path. The novelty of the CAMETA framework lies in the heterogeneous map representation and the heterogeneous graph neural network architecture. As a result of the proposed novel structure, CAMETA improves the generalization capability compared to the state-of-the-art methods that rely on structured road infrastructure and historical data. The simulation results demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of the multi-agent ETA prediction layer, with a mean average percentage error improvement of 29.5% and 44% when compared to a traditional path planning method (A *) which does not consider conflicts. The performance of the CAMETA framework shows significant improvements in terms of robustness to noise and conflicts as well as determining proficient routes compared to state-of-the-art multi-agent path planners.

In this work we propose a holistic framework for autonomous aerial inspection tasks, using semantically-aware, yet, computationally efficient planning and mapping algorithms. The system leverages state-of-the-art receding horizon exploration techniques for next-best-view (NBV) planning with geometric and semantic segmentation information provided by state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs), with the goal of enriching environment representations. The contributions of this article are threefold, first we propose an efficient sensor observation model, and a reward function that encodes the expected information gains from the observations taken from specific view points. Second, we extend the reward function to incorporate not only geometric but also semantic probabilistic information, provided by a DCNN for semantic segmentation that operates in real-time. The incorporation of semantic information in the environment representation allows biasing exploration towards specific objects, while ignoring task-irrelevant ones during planning. Finally, we employ our approaches in an autonomous drone shipyard inspection task. A set of simulations in realistic scenarios demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed framework when compared with the state-of-the-art.