Paper ID: 2501.04193

GNN-based Decentralized Perception in Multirobot Systems for Predicting Worker Actions

Ali Imran, Giovanni Beltrame, David St-Onge

In industrial environments, predicting human actions is essential for ensuring safe and effective collaboration between humans and robots. This paper introduces a perception framework that enables mobile robots to understand and share information about human actions in a decentralized way. The framework first allows each robot to build a spatial graph representing its surroundings, which it then shares with other robots. This shared spatial data is combined with temporal information to track human behavior over time. A swarm-inspired decision-making process is used to ensure all robots agree on a unified interpretation of the human's actions. Results show that adding more robots and incorporating longer time sequences improve prediction accuracy. Additionally, the consensus mechanism increases system resilience, making the multi-robot setup more reliable in dynamic industrial settings.

Submitted: Jan 8, 2025