A Multimodal Stochastic Planning Approach for Navigation and Multi-Robot Coordination

Abstract: In this paper, we present a receding-horizon, sampling-based planner capable of reasoning over multimodal policy distributions. By using the cross-entropy method to optimize a multimodal policy under a common cost function, our approach increases robustness against local minima and promotes effective exploration of the solution space. We show that our approach naturally extends to multi-robot collision-free planning, enables agents to share diverse candidate policies to avoid deadlocks, and allows teams to minimize a global objective without incurring the computational complexity of centralized optimization. Numerical simulations demonstrate that employing multiple modes significantly improves success rates in trap environments and in multi-robot collision avoidance. Hardware experiments further validate the approach's real-time feasibility and practical performance.