Navigation-Aware Path Planning and Multi-Agent Coordination in Challenging Environments

Kristen Michaelson, Manan Gandhi, and Renato Zanetti

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	Effective information-gathering is crucial for teams of agents operating in challenging environments. Traditional path planning methods may fail to produce sufficiently informative trajectories. This work presents a cost function for optimal global planning that captures the total navigation uncertainty over the course of the trajectory. The cost metric, based on linear covariance analysis (LinCov), induces navigation-friendly behaviors by drawing agents into regions where they can collect informative measurements. This idea is extended for multi-agent planning: one agent acts a a moving beacon, providing positioning information to other agents operating within range. Index Terms—global planning, rapidly-exploring random trees, linear covariance analysis
Published in:	2025 IEEE/ION Position, Location and Navigation Symposium (PLANS) April 28 - 1, 2025 Salt Lake Marriott Downtown at City Creek Salt Lake City, UT
Pages:	1319 - 1326
Cite this article:	Michaelson, Kristen, Gandhi, Manan, Zanetti, Renato, "Navigation-Aware Path Planning and Multi-Agent Coordination in Challenging Environments," 2025 IEEE/ION Position, Location and Navigation Symposium (PLANS), Salt Lake City, UT, April 2025, pp. 1319-1326.
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