# SCI: A Contact-Based Optimization Method for Collision-Free Motion Planning for a Million Robots

- Source: arXiv cs.RO
- Published: 2026-11-02T05:00:00.000Z
- RoboHot: https://robohot.news/en/items/t75irl4rs4e1zmtedbt1vp5ok
- Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41548

## Summary

The authors propose the sequential contact insertion (SCI) algorithm, which organizes optimization around contact points where robots reach the minimum allowed separation and analytically reconstructs trajectories between contacts. In numerical experiments, the method can plan for one million robots within minutes, while thousands of robots take less than one second; on problems solvable by a fixed-grid sequential convex programming baseline, SCI achieves median speedups of several orders of magnitude with comparable solution accuracy.