Akule: Fast and Scalable Multi-Robot Motion Planning via Sparse Interaction Diffusion

Manav Vora, Gokul Puthumanaillam, Aditya Penumarti, Jane Shin, Melkior Ornik

Diffusion models provide expressive trajectory priors for multi-robot motion planning (MRMP), but scaling them to large teams requires coordinating individual motions without expensive joint computation. We introduce Akule, a sparse interaction diffusion framework that augments a frozen single-robot prior with three learned modules: a reusable pairwise correction model $R_φ$, a contextual selector $U_ψ$ that determines which corrections to evaluate, and a composer $G_ω$ that combines their effects through context-dependent signed weights. This decomposition separates which interactions merit computation from how their effects should be combined into coordinated denoising updates. We train $R_φ$ using matched pairwise trajectory optimizations, then learn $G_ω$ and $U_ψ$ from physically optimized joint trajectories without requiring a prescribed ground-truth interaction graph. The resulting joint proposals are passed to a downstream search-based planner for validation and repair. Across diverse MRMP benchmarks, Akule achieves competitive planning success, complete-planner speedups of up to $25\times$, zero-shot population transfer, and successful planning with up to $256$ robots.…