Multi-Robot Navigation in Social Mini-Games: Definitions, Taxonomy, and Algorithms

2025-08-18

AI Summary

Multi-robot navigation in narrow, crowded environments—such as doorways or corridor intersections—suffers from poor performance under frequent interactions with humans and among robots; existing approaches lack unified modeling and standardized evaluation. Method: This paper introduces the concept of *Social Micro-Games* (SMGs), formally defining their structural characteristics, taxonomy, and terminology for the first time. It establishes a unified research framework incorporating communication, collaboration, and observability assumptions, integrating multi-robot navigation, game theory, and decentralized interaction modeling. A structured evaluation protocol is designed, and the first comprehensive survey of SMG solvers grounded in this taxonomy is conducted. Contribution/Results: The work significantly enhances comparability, reproducibility, and practical applicability in the field, providing new researchers with a clear benchmark, standardized paradigm, and actionable guidance for future investigation.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multi-Robot Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Social Networks and Social Media: Social mining and social search on the Web
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

The ``Last Mile Challenge'' has long been considered an important, yet unsolved, challenge for autonomous vehicles, public service robots, and delivery robots. A central issue in this challenge is the ability of robots to navigate constrained and cluttered environments (e.g., doorways, hallways, corridor intersections), often while competing for space with other robots and humans. We refer to these environments as ``Social Mini-Games'' (SMGs). SMGs are tightly coupled, high-agency interactions that arise within general multi-robot navigation (MRN) scenarios. They are identified through certain distinct characteristics and require specialized metrics to evaluate them. Traditional navigation approaches designed for MRN do not perform well in SMGs, which has led to focused research on dedicated SMG solvers (navigation methods specialized to navigate in SMGs), which has flourished in recent years. However, publications on SMG navigation research make different assumptions (on centralized versus decentralized, observability, communication, cooperation, etc.), and have different objective functions (safety versus liveness). These assumptions and objectives are sometimes implicitly assumed or described informally. This makes it difficult to establish appropriate baselines for comparison in research papers, as well as making it difficult for practitioners to find the papers relevant to their concrete application. Such ad-hoc representation of the field also presents a barrier to new researchers wanting to start research in this area. SMG navigation research requires its own taxonomy, definitions, and evaluation protocols to guide effective research moving forward. This survey is the first to catalog SMG solvers using a well-defined and unified taxonomy and to classify existing methods accordingly.

Problem

• Defining Social Mini-Games in multi-robot navigation scenarios
• Evaluating specialized metrics for constrained navigation environments
• Establishing unified taxonomy for SMG solver comparisons

Innovation

• Defining Social Mini-Games taxonomy
• Classifying specialized SMG navigation algorithms
• Establishing unified evaluation protocols