A Minor-Testing Approach for Coordinated Motion Planning with Sliding Robots

We study a variant of the Coordinated Motion Planning problem on undirected graphs, referred to herein as the Coordinated Sliding-Motion Planning (CSMP) problem. In this variant, we are given an undirected graph G, k robots R₁,… ,R_k positioned on distinct vertices of G, p ≤ k distinct destination vertices for robots R₁,… ,R_p, and 𝓁 ∈ ℕ. The problem is to decide if there is a serial schedule of at most 𝓁 moves (i.e., of makespan 𝓁) such that at the end of the schedule each robot with a destination reaches it, where a robot’s move is a free path (unoccupied by any robots) from its current position to an unoccupied vertex. The problem is known to be NP-hard even on full grids. It has been studied in several contexts, including coin movement and reconfiguration problems, with respect to feasibility, complexity, and approximation. Geometric variants of the problem, in which congruent geometric-shape robots (e.g., unit disk/squares) slide or translate in the Euclidean plane, have also been studied extensively. We investigate the parameterized complexity of CSMP with respect to two parameters: the number k of robots and the makespan 𝓁. As our first result, we present a fixed-parameter algorithm for CSMP parameterized by k. For our second result, we present a fixed-parameter algorithm parameterized by 𝓁 for the special case of CSMP in which only a single robot has a destination and the graph is planar. A crucial new ingredient for both of our results is that the solution admits a succinct representation as a small labeled topological minor of the input graph.