Abstract
Multi-robot-arm motion planning is a key challenge in deploying multiple manipulators for industrial tasks such as manufacturing. Existing search-based and sampling-based solvers often require significant computation time to produce collision-free, high-quality motions suitable for safe real-world execution. In this work, we introduce a new suite of multi-robot-arm motion planners capable of near real-time motion generation, combining classical planning algorithms with state-of-the-art vectorized collision-checking techniques. Based on CPU SIMD instructions, our new planners accelerate their primary bottleneck, collision checking, and achieve up to two orders of magnitude speedup in both motion planning and execution postprocessing for multi-arm manipulation tasks. We also release our implementation to lower the barrier for research and development of multi-robot-arm planning and manipulation problems. Code is available at https://vamp-mr.github.io/vamp-mr
Explore similar work
Apr 27, 2026cs.RO
In this paper, we extend the recent Vector-Accelerated Motion Planning (VAMP) framework to multi-robot motion planning (MRMP). We develop two vector-accelerated primitives, multi-robot MotionValidation (MotVal) and FindFirstConflict (FFC), which exploit SIMD parallelism within the multi-robot domain. On pure multi-robot motion validation tests, this achieves over 1100X speedup in validation time. Additionally, we modify a representative set of MRMP algorithms to use these new primitives. The relative speedup for each algorithm is studied on scenarios with manipulator, rigid body, and heterogeneous teams with some instances producing multi-robot solutions in the order of milliseconds and, in many cases, shows planning time speedups of over 850X.
James D. Motes, Marco Morales, Nancy M. Amato
Jun 26, 2026cs.RO
This paper presents Parallel ARC (P-ARC), a parallel variant of the Adaptive Robot Coordination (ARC) approach to multi-robot motion planning (MRMP). P-ARC proposes a parallel variant for each of the three main stages in ARC: initial individual solutions, conflict detection, and conflict resolution, exploiting the independence created by ARC's decomposition of the MRMP problem. Additionally, we employ an OR-parallel multi-start strategy to both ARC and P-ARC, creating a hybrid parallel strategy OR-P-ARC. We evaluate the impact of the different parallel strategies for ARC using a set of scaling 2D mobile and planar manipulator scenarios with up to 128 robots to control for conflicts and work distribution across the stages of ARC. Additionally, we demonstrate planning time speedups approaching 4X over the sequential version for large Panda multi-manipulator teams in real-world inspired scenarios when deploying 16 CPU cores.
James D. Motes, Marco Morales, Nancy M. Amato
Jun 25, 2026cs.RO
We present AO-ARC, an anytime multi-robot motion planning (MRMP) method that achieves initial solution times on par with state-of-the-art MRMP feasibility solvers while converging faster and more reliably than existing anytime MRMP methods as the number of robots increases. AO-ARC adapts the AO-x meta-algorithm for converting feasibility solvers into anytime algorithms by iteratively calling the original ARC method on bounded MRMP instances under a makespan cost metric. This exploits the adaptive (de)coupling of ARC while maintaining the consistent cost bound across robot (de)compositions needed for AO-x. We provide theoretical analysis proving the asymptotic optimality properties of AO- ARC and conduct empirical evaluation on a set of 2D scenarios with different levels of coordination complexity and a 3D manipulator scenario representative of real-world applications.
James D. Motes, Marco Morales, Nancy M. Amato