Lifelong Multi-Subsystem Pickup and Delivery with Buffer-Limited Handover Stations

Coordinating payload transfers between subsystems is a critical challenge in lifelong Multi-Agent Pickup and Delivery (MAPD). We study systems where agents are confined to separate regions and must exchange payloads through shared handover stations. These stations, equipped with single docks and finite buffers, are inherently vulnerable to blocking and starvation. We formalize this problem as Multi-Subsystem MAPD with Buffer-limited Handover Stations (MS-MAPD-BHS). We then propose Handover-Aware Reservation and Routing (HARR), an online controller that couples per-subsystem planners. HARR uses a shared dock reservation calendar and a deterministic rolling-horizon projection of buffer occupancy to coordinate actions. A candidate route is accepted only if its dock interval is free and the resulting buffer occupancy projection remains within capacity. Under perfect execution, these checks ensure collision-free dock use and buffer-safe committed operations within the reservation horizon. In simulation, HARR achieves up to 77% higher throughput and 92% lower backlog than a fixed-dock ablation at moderate load, while also reducing planning time relative to a coupled station-aware Token Passing baseline. These results show that explicit interface coordination substantially improves stability in modular multi-subsystem transport.

GRACE: A Unified 2D Multi-Robot Path Planning Simulator & Benchmark for Grid, Roadmap, And Continuous Environments

Advancing Multi-Agent Pathfinding (MAPF) and Multi-Robot Motion Planning (MRMP) requires platforms that enable transparent, reproducible comparisons across modeling choices. Existing tools either scale under simplifying assumptions (grids, homogeneous agents) or offer higher fidelity with less comparable instrumentation. We present GRACE, a unified 2D simulator+benchmark that instantiates the same task at multiple abstraction levels (grid, roadmap, continuous) via explicit, reproducible operators and a common evaluation protocol. Our empirical results on public maps and representative planners enable commensurate comparisons on a shared instance set. Furthermore, we quantify the expected representation-fidelity trade-offs (MRMP solves instances at higher fidelity but lower speed, while grid/roadmap planners scale farther). By consolidating representation, execution, and evaluation, GRACE thereby aims to make cross-representation studies more comparable and provides a means to advance multi-robot planning research and its translation to practice.

Reinforcement Learning for Solving Robotic Reaching Tasks in the Neurorobotics Platform

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great potential for solving tasks in well-defined environments like games or robotics. This paper aims to solve the robotic reaching task in a simulation run on the Neurorobotics Platform (NRP). The target position is initialized randomly and the robot has 6 degrees of freedom. We compare the performance of various state-of-the-art model-free algorithms. At first, the agent is trained on ground truth data from the simulation to reach the target position in only one continuous movement. Later the complexity of the task is increased by using image data as input from the simulation environment. Experimental results show that training efficiency and results can be improved with appropriate dynamic training schedule function for curriculum learning.