D2CoPlan: A Differentiable Decentralized Planner for Multi-Robot Coverage

Abstract

Centralized approaches for multi-robot coverage planning problems suffer from the lack of scalability. Learning-based distributed algorithms provide a scalable avenue in addition to bringing data-oriented feature generation capabilities to the table, allowing integration with other learning-based approaches. To this end, we present a learning-based, differentiable distributed coverage planner (D2CoPLAN) which scales efficiently in runtime and number of agents compared to the expert algorithm, and performs on par with the classical distributed algorithm. In addition, we show that D2CoPLANcan be seamlessly combined with other learning methods to learn end-to-end, resulting in a better solution than the individually trained modules, opening doors to further research for tasks that remain elusive with classical methods.