ALAN: adaptive learning for multi-agent navigation

In multi-agent navigation, agents need to move towards their goal locations while avoiding collisions with other agents and obstacles, often without communication. Existing methods compute motions that are locally optimal but do not account for the aggregated motions of all agents, producing inefficient global behavior especially when agents move in a crowded space. In this work, we develop a method that allows agents to dynamically adapt their behavior to their local conditions. We formulate the multi-agent navigation problem as an action-selection problem and propose an approach, ALAN, that allows agents to compute time-efficient and collision-free motions. ALAN is highly scalable because each agent makes its own decisions on how to move, using a set of velocities optimized for a variety of navigation tasks. Experimental results show that agents using ALAN, in general, reach their destinations faster than using ORCA, a state-of-the-art collision avoidance framework, and two other navigation models.