English

Scalable Multi-Robot Path Planning via Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization

Robotics 2026-02-17 v1 Quantum Physics

Abstract

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) remains a fundamental challenge in robotics, where classical centralized approaches exhibit exponential growth in joint-state complexity as the number of agents increases. This paper investigates Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) as a structurally scalable alternative for simultaneous multi-robot path planning. This approach is a robotics-oriented QUBO formulation incorporating BFS-based logical pre-processing (achieving over 95% variable reduction), adaptive penalty design for collision and constraint enforcement, and a time-windowed decomposition strategy that enables execution within current hardware limitations. An experimental evaluation in grid environments with up to four robots demonstrated near-optimal solutions in dense scenarios and favorable scaling behavior compared to sequential classical planning. These results establish a practical and reproducible baseline for future quantum and quantum-inspired multi-robot coordinations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.14799,
  title  = {Scalable Multi-Robot Path Planning via Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization},
  author = {Javier González Villasmil},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.14799},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

21 pages, 9 figures, 1 table. Accompanying open-source implementation at https://github.com/JavideuS/Spooky

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:38:35.637Z