Deploying Ten Thousand Robots: Scalable Imitation Learning for Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding
He Jiang, Yutong Wang, Rishi Veerapaneni, Tanishq Duhan, Guillaume Sartoretti, Jiaoyang Li · 2025
Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding (LMAPF) repeatedly finds collision-free paths for multiple agents that are continually assigned new goals when they reach current ones. Recently, this field has embraced learning-based methods, which reactively generate single-step actions based on individual local observations. However, it is still challenging for them to match the performance of the best search-based algorithms, especially in large-scale settings. This work proposes an imitation-learning-based LMAPF solver that introduces a novel communication module as well as systematic single-step collision resolution and global guidance techniques. Our proposed solver, Scalable Imitation Learning for LMAPF (SILLM), inherits the fast reasoning speed of learning-based methods and the high solution quality of search-based methods with the help of modern GPUs. Across six large-scale maps with up to$\mathbf{1 0, 0 0 0}$agents and varying obstacle structures, SILLM surpasses the best learning- and search-based baselines, achieving average throughput improvements of$\mathbf{137.7 \%}$and$\mathbf{1 6. 0 \%}$, respectively. Furthermore, SILLM also beats the winning solution of the 2023 League of Robot Runners, an international LMAPF competition. Finally, we validated SILLM with 10 real robots and$\mathbf{1 0 0}$virtual robots in a mock warehouse environment.