HECTOR: Human-centric Hierarchical Coordination and Supervision of Robotic Fleets under Continual Temporal Tasks

Multi-agent systems can be extremely efficient when working concurrently and collaboratively, e.g., for delivery, surveillance, search and rescue. Coordination of such teams often involves two aspects: selecting appropriate subteams for different tasks in various areas, and coordinating agents in the subteams to execute the associated subtasks. Existing work often assumes that the tasks are static and known beforehand, where an integer program can be formulated and solved offline. However, in many applications, the team-wise tasks are generated online continually by external requests, and the amount of subtasks within each task is uncertain, e.g., the number of packages to deliver or victims to rescue. The aforementioned offline solution becomes inadequate as it would require constant re-computation for the whole team and global communication to broadcast the results. Thus, this work tackles the large-scale coordination problem under continual and uncertain temporal tasks, specified as temporal logic formulas over collaborative actions. The proposed hierarchical framework, HULK, consists of two interleaved layers: the rolling assignment of currently known tasks to subteams within a certain horizon, and the dynamic coordination within a subteam given the detected subtasks during online execution. Thus, coordination is performed hierarchically at different granularities and triggering conditions, improving computational efficiency and robustness. The method is validated rigorously over large-scale heterogeneous systems under various temporal tasks and environment uncertainties.

We propose a human-factor-aware method of allocating robot supervision tasks to multiple human operators. In scenarios where multiple operators occasionally teleoperate multiple robots to help the robots overcome difficulties, the allocation of the supervisory control tasks to humans needs to consider the real-time cognitive states of individual operators. However, most existing methods assume fixed supervisory capacity per operator and overlook fluctuations in the human factors such as workload and fatigue. As a result, workload distribution can be unbalanced where some operators become overloaded while the others remain underused. Our method dynamically regulates supervisory capacity and allocates tasks in a way that maintains balanced mental workload, prevents overload, and improves overall team performance. The allocation method uses a greedy strategy that minimizes estimated operator workloads with task prioritization. Robots are assigned to operators by reflecting their current supervisory capacity where the required effort depends on the types of tasks. In the user study, the analysis across predefined time intervals shows that the proposed method consistently achieves higher performance and lower behavioral signs of fatigue compared to a baseline method that does not consider human factors. These results highlight adaptive capacity adjustment as an effective preventive mechanism for sustaining operator performance in long-duration, high-demand settings.

Robot swarms promise scalable assistance in complex and hazardous environments. Task planning lies at the core of human-swarm collaboration, translating the operator's intent into coordinated swarm actions and helping determine when validation or intervention is required during execution. In long-horizon missions under dynamic scenarios, however, reliable task planning becomes difficult to maintain: emerging events and changing conditions demand continual adaptation, and sustained operator oversight imposes substantial cognitive burden. Existing LLM-based planning tools can support plan generation, yet they remain susceptible to invalid task orderings and infeasible robot actions, resulting in frequent manual adjustment. Here we introduce a neuro-symbolic framework for long-horizon human-swarm collaboration that tightly melds verifiable task planning with context-grounded LLM reasoning. We formalize mission goals and operational rules as temporal logic formulas and admissible task orderings as task automata. Conditioned on these formal constraints and live perceptual context, LLMs generate executable subtask sequences that satisfy mission rules and remain grounded in the current scene. An uncertainty-aware scheduler then assigns subtasks across the heterogeneous swarm to maximize parallelisms while remaining resilient to disruptions. An event-triggered interaction protocol further limits operator involvement to sparse, high-level confirmation and guidance. Deployment on a heterogeneous robotic fleet yields similar results while remaining robust to hardware-specific actuation and communication uncertainties. Together, these results support a formal and scalable paradigm for reliable and low-overhead human-swarm collaboration in dynamic environments