SPARC: Spatial-Aware Path Planning via Attentive Agent Communication
Abstract
Efficient communication is critical for decentralized Multi-Robot Path Planning (MRPP), yet existing learned communication methods treat all neighboring robots equally regardless of their spatial proximity, leading to diluted attention in congested regions where coordination matters most. We propose Relation enhanced Multi Head Attention (RMHA), a communication mechanism that explicitly embeds pairwise Manhattan distances into the attention weight computation, enabling each robot to dynamically prioritize messages from spatially relevant neighbors. Combined with a distance-constrained attention mask and GRU gated message fusion, RMHA integrates seamlessly with MAPPO for stable end-to-end training. In zero-shot generalization from 8 training robots to 128 test robots on 40x40 grids, RMHA achieves approximately 75 percent success rate at 30 percent obstacle density outperforming the best baseline by over 25 percentage points. Ablation studies confirm that distance-relation encoding is the key contributor to success rate improvement in high-density environments. Index Terms-Multi-robot path planning, graph attention mechanism, multi-head attention, communication optimization, cooperative decision-making
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.02845,
title = {SPARC: Spatial-Aware Path Planning via Attentive Agent Communication},
author = {Sayang Mu and Xiangyu Wu and Bo An},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.02845},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
The manuscript is being withdrawn at the request of the first author for the purpose of revising content and re-uploading a revised version with updated data/figures/text . The revised manuscript will be resubmitted to arXiv promptly with the same author list and research theme