Conflict-Based Search as a Protocol: A Multi-Agent Motion Planning Protocol for Heterogeneous Agents, Solvers, and Independent Tasks
Abstract
Imagine the future construction site, hospital, or office with dozens of robots bought from different manufacturers. How can we enable these different robots to effectively move in a shared environment, given that each robot may have its own independent motion planning system? This work shows how we can get efficient collision-free movements between algorithmically heterogeneous agents by using Conflict-Based Search (Sharon et al. 2015) as a protocol. At its core, the CBS Protocol requires one specific single-agent motion planning API; finding a collision-free path that satisfies certain space-time constraints. Given such an API, CBS uses a central planner to find collision-free paths - independent of how the API is implemented. We demonstrate how this protocol enables multi-agent motion planning for a heterogeneous team of agents completing independent tasks with a variety of single-agent planners including: Heuristic Search (e.g., A*), Sampling Based Search (e.g., RRT), Optimization (e.g., Direct Collocation), Diffusion, and Reinforcement Learning.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.00425,
title = {Conflict-Based Search as a Protocol: A Multi-Agent Motion Planning Protocol for Heterogeneous Agents, Solvers, and Independent Tasks},
author = {Rishi Veerapaneni and Alvin Tang and Haodong He and Sophia Zhao and Viraj Shah and Yidai Cen and Ziteng Ji and Gabriel Olin and Jon Arrizabalaga and Yorai Shaoul and Jiaoyang Li and Maxim Likhachev},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.00425},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Published at ICRA 2026, Project webpage: https://rishi-v.github.io/CBS-Protocol/