Accepted Paper at WAFR 2026

We are excited to announce that our paper, “Scalable Multi-Agent Maze Traversal With Local Communication,” by Julian Rau, Jahir Argote-Gerald, Grace McFassel, Genki Miyauchi, Paul Trodden and Roderich Groß, has been accepted for presentation and publication at the 17th World Symposium on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR 2026) in Oulu, Finland!

In this work, we present a distributed multi-agent maze traversal algorithm for unknown (possibly cyclic) maze-like environments such as cave networks or pipe systems, where communication is limited. The algorithm leverages a leader-switching mechanism where one agent uses an underlying single-agent maze solver (such as Trémaux's algorithm) to actively explore the environment while others coordinate through local leader-follower interactions. We prove that the approach is complete and the makespan is asymptotically equivalent to an optimal full-knowledge strategy. Large-scale simulations show a decreasing average sum-of-fuels as the number of agents increases and demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms a naïve baseline.

The acceptance marks an exciting opportunity to share our latest research with the international robotics community at one of the leading conferences on algorithmic foundations of robotics. We look forward to presenting our work in Oulu and engaging with fellow researchers at WAFR 2026.