[2603.02845] SPARC: Spatial-Aware Path Planning via Attentive Robot Communication

Computer Science > Robotics arXiv:2603.02845 (cs) [Submitted on 3 Mar 2026] Title:SPARC: Spatial-Aware Path Planning via Attentive Robot Communication Authors:Sayang Mu, Xiangyu Wu, Bo An View a PDF of the paper titled SPARC: Spatial-Aware Path Planning via Attentive Robot Communication, by Sayang Mu and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) 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 mechan...