Multi-Robot Coordination

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34 papers in the last four weeks, up 467% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 202

Jun 5, 2026cs.RO

A Multi-Operator Mixed-Reality Interface for Multi-Robot Control and Coordination: Co-Located and Private Workspace Collaboration

Multi-operator control of robot teams requires not only access to the same mission information, but also mechanisms for maintaining shared awareness and preventing conflicting interventions. Building on our previous HORUS interface (Holistic Operational Reality for Unified Systems) we present a mixed-reality interface that extends single-operator multi-robot supervision to collaborative multi-operator use. The system supports two complementary modes: a co-located shared workspace, in which operators observe and manipulate the same mini-map in the same physical location, and a private-workspace mode, in which operators work on the same mission through independently placed local workspaces. The architecture combines registration-driven scene construction, lightweight shared-session synchronization, and per-robot control leases to support collaborative monitoring, tasking, and teleoperation while preventing conflicting commands. We evaluated the approach in a human-subject study with 36 participants (18 pairs) controlling three Nova Carter mobile robots in two search environments. The performance of the objective task was comparable across the two modes, indicating that both modes supported effective mission execution. However, the co-located shared workspace significantly improved perceived collaboration, shared understanding, and handoff clarity, and was the preferred collaborative mode. These results indicate that physically co-locating the MR workspace improves how operators coordinate even when the underlying robot-control tools remain unchanged.

Omotoye Shamsudeen Adekoya, Antonio Sgorbissa, Carmine Tommaso Recchiuto

DIBRIS Department, RICE Laboratory, University of Genoa, Italy

Robot Teleoperation Multi-Robot Coordination Human-Robot Collaboration Human-Robot Interaction

Jun 4, 2026cs.RO

Multi-Robot Planning and Control from CCTV Camera Networks in a Real Warehouse

Off-board control of mobile robots from cameras embedded in the environment offers a practical path to scalable autonomy, moving sensing and compute off the robots. We extend this idea from the single-robot case to coordinated fleets in a real warehouse, driving multiple robots with only a distributed CCTV network and edge compute. The system operates entirely in image space over an uncalibrated, pixel-wise topological camera graph, enabling wide-area operation with flexible camera placement. A hierarchical planner selects a camera sequence per robot and plans its image-space motion through each view, coordinating robots with a prioritised-then-joint strategy and treating overlapping camera regions as shared resources held by one robot at a time to prevent collisions and deadlocks. We validate the approach in a real warehouse with four robots and 30 cameras across six 27 m aisles, reporting mission times and coordination statistics. To our knowledge, this is the first field demonstration of multi-robot planning and coordination using only an external camera network and off-board compute, with robots carrying no task-specific navigation hardware.

Luke Robinson, Benjamin Ramtoula, Anas Izaaryene +2

Oxford Robotics Institute, University of Oxford, UK · Robot Systems Group, Technical University of Munich, Germany

Robotic Control Multi-Robot Motion Planning Multi-Robot Coordination Vision-Based Robot Control

Jun 4, 2026cs.RO

Merging model-based control with multi-agent reinforcement learning for multi-agent cooperative teaming strategies

In this work, we propose a framework that combines multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) with model-based control to achieve safe, dynamically feasible actions in cooperative multi-agent tasks. Multi-agent reinforcement learning provides the advantage of learning cooperative policies for multi-agent teams from discrete non-differentiable rewards in a long planning horizon. Model-predictive control is robust and offers safe, dynamically feasible actions in a fast replanning framework for short horizons. We propose an algorithm that extends actor-critic model predictive control for MARL which we refer to as multi-agent actor-critic model predictive control (MA-AC-MPC). We demonstrate the capabilities of this algorithm by applying it to a multi-agent pursuit-evasion scenario. Specifically, we compare the evader team's strategy using the MA-AC-MPC model and a multi-layer perceptron model (MA-AC-MLP). The pursuer team uses augmented proportional navigation as it is accepted as an advanced adversarial control law. We also provide an example with a heterogeneous environment where a drone and omni-wheeled rover cooperate to achieve repeatable and successful landing with 100% success rate in hardware for MA-AC-MPC compared to 60% for MA-AC-MLP. We demonstrate the robustness of the proposed MA-AC-MPC algorithm in hardware for both environments.

Christian Llanes, Spencer W. Jensen, Samuel Coogan

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA. · Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM 87123, USA.

Multi-Agent Control Multi-Robot Coordination Model Predictive Control Safe RL Cooperative MARL

Jun 3, 2026cs.RO

CADENCE: Predicting Realized MAPF Execution Time Beyond Sum of Costs

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) algorithms are increasingly used to plan motion for robot teams in industrial warehouses and robotic shared workspaces, but standard MAPF algorithm evaluation metrics, such as Sum of Costs (SoC), makespan, and planner runtime, can obscure how planner choices translate into realistic execution performance. We present CADENCE (Coordination and Action-Driven Estimation for Networked Continuous Execution), a hardware study of this evaluation gap on a fixed 7 by 7 workcell with seven differential drive robots, asking which features available before execution can best predict final wall-clock completion time. We compare SoC, total planned travel cost, primitive motion burden (how much basic motion the plan requires, such as makespan, turns, consecutive moves, and start-stop transitions), and interaction aware coordination structure (how much inter-robot coordination the plan induces, such as dependency links, interacting robot pairs, dependency depth, and crowding exposure). To test this, we generate 120 plans across 15 scenarios -- 5 Empty, 5 Medium Random, and 5 Bottleneck and execute each plan four times, yielding a 480 trial hardware corpus. Using both a scenario-held -- out ridge model and a trial-level mixed-effects model, we find that SoC alone is informative but incomplete, while primitive motion burden gives the strongest improvement, reducing held out error by about 48.6%-59.8% in MAE and 44.2%-61.4% in RMSE relative to SoC-only models. Interaction-aware coordination features add smaller, less uniform gains, most clearly in the mixed-effects analysis. Across both models and uncertainty checks, primitive motion burden is the most reliable additional signal beyond SoC, suggesting that much of the execution time gap is already visible in the offline plan before any robot starts moving.

Abhishek S, Badrikanath Praharaj, Sreeram MV

BuildMachineLabs

Multi-Robot Systems Multi-Robot Coordination Multi-Agent Path Finding

Jun 3, 2026cs.RO

Cooperative Circumnavigation for Multiple Unmanned Surface Vehicles Without External Localization

This paper proposes a cooperative target circumnavigation framework for multiple unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) operating without external localization. The objective is to maintain a uniform circular formation of a specified radius around a target using only limited onboard sensing. The framework adopts a heterogeneous perception strategy that distinguishes between the asymmetric sensing relationships with the target and among the USVs. Specifically, the USVs obtain relative range and displacement measurements through active perception and inter-vehicle communication, while bearing measurements to a non-cooperative target are acquired via passive sensors. To estimate relative positions--both among USVs and between each USV and the target--we employ a Maximum Correntropy Kalman Filter and a Pseudo-Linear Kalman Filter, respectively. A coupled oscillator-based formation controller is designed to ensure system observability while achieving circumnavigation. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that the controller ensures the relative motions between the USVs, as well as that between each USV and the target, satisfy the persistent excitation condition, thereby guaranteeing observability of the Kalman-based filters. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated through numerical simulations.

Xueming Liu, Lin Li, Xiang Zhou +2

School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Sun Yat-sen University (Shenzhen Campus), Shenzhen, China

Multi-Robot Formation Control Multi-Robot Coordination Unmanned Surface Vehicle

Jun 2, 2026cs.RO

RSC: Decentralized Rigid Formation Flocking for Large-Scale Swarms via Hybrid Predictive Control and Online Reconfiguration

Decentralized rigid formation flocking requires a swarm of autonomous agents to maintain a predetermined geometric configuration while moving, relying solely on local sensing and communication. However, existing decentralized control methods struggle to maintain strict inter-agent distance constraints in cluttered environments, often suffering from local minima deadlocks, high frequency control oscillations, or limited flexibility during obstacle navigation, resulting in low success rate. To address these limitations, we propose Rigid Swarm Control (RSC), a decentralized control framework for large-scale rigid formation flocking. To escape local minima via robust long-term planning while ensuring short-term safety, RSC integrates finite-horizon trajectory predictions with a reactive artificial potential field (APF) safety controller within a hybrid architecture. Furthermore, to accelerate formation reassembly after obstacle traversal without interrupting task execution, RSC introduces an online leader-follower reconfiguration mechanism based on stable role exchange. Extensive evaluations in challenging cluttered environments with 25 UAVs demonstrate that RSC reliably unifies rigid formation maintenance, obstacle avoidance, and target tracking. Under strict success criteria - collision-free operation with a maximum relative edge-length error below 10%, RSC achieves an 83% success rate, significantly outperforming existing heuristic and learning-based baselines that fall below 5%.

Ganyu Zou, Linhan Wang, Chen Dai +2

Robotic Control Multi-Robot Formation Control Aerial Robotics Swarm Robotics Multi-Agent Control Multi-Robot Coordination+1

Jun 2, 2026cs.RO

Multi-Agent Next-Best-View Optimization for Risk-Averse Planning

Multi-agent Next-Best-View (NBV) selection for safe path planning in uncertain and unknown environments requires informative, safety-aware, and efficient coordination. Centralized approaches rely on sharing raw sensor data or significant communication overhead, resulting in limited scalability. We propose a distributed, risk-aware multi-agent NBV framework in which each robot maintains a private local 3D Gaussian Splatting map and the team jointly maximizes expected information gain (EIG) restricted to masked zones along planned trajectories. The resulting distributed objective is solved by Consensus ADMM (C-ADMM) over a communication graph, with each robot exchanging only candidate viewpoints, planned trajectory descriptors, and scalar EIG contributions. Collision risk along each trajectory is modeled via Average Value-at-Risk (AV@R) over the local 3DGS map and used both to shape the masking radius and to score planned paths. Experiments in Gibson environments at multiple team sizes show that the distributed formulation approaches the centralized baseline in mapping quality and trajectory safety while reducing communication by orders of magnitude.

Amirhossein Mollaei Khass, Vivek Pandey, Guangyi Liu +3

Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics, Lehigh University · Amazon Robotics

Next-Best-View Planning Multi-Robot Exploration Multi-Robot Coordination Robot Safety Safe Motion Planning

Jun 1, 2026cs.RO

Market-Based Replanning for Safety-Critical UAV Swarms in Search and Rescue Missions

Reliable autonomous UAV swarms in Search and Rescue (SAR) missions require fault-tolerant coordination capable of sustaining operations despite agent degradation. This paper introduces the Intelligent Replanning Drone Swarm (IRDS), a distributed coordination architecture designed for resource-constrained environments. The proposed framework employs a Reverse-Auction market mechanism where agents bid to service search sectors based on a distance-weighted cost function, coupled with a geometric consensus protocol for target verification. We evaluate the approach through physics-based simulations (N=8 agents, 8x8 grid) subjected to stochastic fault injection. Results indicate that the swarm autonomously reallocates tasks from failed agents with low latency relative to the total mission duration, maintaining a mission success rate of 93% under 25% workforce degradation. The proposed framework demonstrates a robust, empirically tested method for self-healing aerial robotic coordination.

Luiz Giacomossi, Andrea Haglund, Claire Namatovu +6

Mälardalen University (MDU) Västerås, Sweden

Aerial Robotics Swarm Robotics Robotics Multi-Robot Coordination Multi-Robot Task Allocation Search-and-Rescue Robotics

Jun 1, 2026cs.RO

Spatio-Temporal Reconnection for Multi-Robot Networks using Adaptive Prescribed-Time CBFs

In multi-robot systems, maintaining persistent communication graph connectivity is often overly restrictive, especially when robots have limited communication ranges but operate in large environments. Instead, allowing robots to temporarily disconnect and later reconnect is often more desirable for efficient task execution while still ensuring timely information sharing across the team. In this paper, we propose an adaptive prescribed-time control barrier function (adaptive PT-CBF) framework that enables robots to temporarily disconnect and re-enter the communication range within an adjustable and feasible prescribed time. Moreover, we introduce a reconnection triggering mechanism that jointly considers task execution and reconnection urgency, thereby providing a principled way to decide when reconnection should occur. Theoretical analysis justifies convergence to the satisfying reconnection within a prescribed finite time. Experimental results validate the performance of our proposed adaptive PT-CBF with improved task efficiency and satisfying reconnections.

Hao Liu, Yupeng Yang, Yanze Zhang +1

Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607, USA · Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA

Multi-Robot Systems Control Barrier Functions Multi-Robot Coordination Feedback Control Multi-Agent Communication

May 31, 2026cs.MA

Coordinating Task Switching in a Robotics Multi-Agent System Using Behavior Trees

The application of multi-agent systems in robotics is a very challenging field. Several competitions involving such systems are proposed to foster research and development of strategies and mechanisms using games as the underlying domain. Among them are the ones from the \textit{IEEE Very Small Soccer (VSSS)} category, which is the case study described in this paper. In VSSS, two teams of three robots each compete in a very dynamic environment of a soccer game. Thus, coordination of robots' behavior during the game is crucial to win it. In this paper, we present a Behavior-Tree-based approach to support multi-robot coordination within the VSSS team of the ThundeRatz robotics team from the Universidade de S

\tilde{a}

o Paulo. Moreover, a comparison between the proposed approach and the previous one, which was based on a Finite State Machine (FSM), was conducted using the FIRASim simulator. Besides that, the performance of this new strategy was further evaluated in an academic robotics competition.

Lucas Haug, Anarosa Alves Franco Brandão, Arthur Casals

∗LTI - Laborat´orio de T´ecnicas Inteligentes, Universidade de S˜ao Paulo, SP

Robotics Multi-Robot Coordination Behavior Trees

May 31, 2026cs.RO

Tether-Aware Dynamic Collision Avoidance for USV-HROV Systems

Heterogeneous marine robotic systems composed of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) and a hybrid remotely operated vehicle (HROV) have shown great potential for subsea cable inspection. In such missions, the USV tracks the HROV at the surface while supplying power and communication through an umbilical tether. However, dynamic collision avoidance for the USV during HROV tracking is challenging because the submerged tether may scrape against passing vessels, while evasive maneuvers can enlarge the USV--HROV separation, thereby increasing the likelihood of tether tautness and compromising HROV operations. To address these challenges, this work proposes a tether-aware dynamic collision avoidance method for a USV tracking an HROV. First, a tether safety-aware planar domain is introduced to represent the three-dimensional collision risk between the tether and obstacle vessels without an explicit tether shape model. Second, a tether tautness-aware velocity obstacle method is developed to achieve safe avoidance while reducing the likelihood of tether tautness. Finally, the method is integrated with line-of-sight guidance to coordinate HROV tracking and collision avoidance. Gazebo-based simulations show that the proposed method avoids dynamic obstacle vessels while maintaining tether safety and reducing the likelihood of tether tautness during USV evasive maneuvers.

Yang Gu, Ziyang Hong, Xuanlin Chen +4

Collision Avoidance Multi-Robot Coordination Underwater Robotics Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance

May 30, 2026cs.RO

Generative Multi-Robot Motion Planning via Diffusion Modeling with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Guidance

Coordinating multiple robots in shared environments requires generating feasible trajectories for each agent while accounting for interactions among agents. Centralized planning approaches become difficult to scale as the number of robots increases, while decentralized approaches that allow each agent to plan independently do not inherently account for inter-agent interactions. This paper presents a framework for coordinated multi-robot motion planning that combines decentralized generative trajectory planning with multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL)-based coordination. Each robot independently generates candidate trajectories using a diffusion model trained on single-agent motion data, leveraging the generative model's ability to produce feasible and diverse trajectories. To reduce conflicts between agents, a centralized value function trained via MARL guides the reverse diffusion process through gradient-based steering, enabling interaction-aware trajectory generation without centralized joint planning or retraining of the generative model. This guidance follows an exponential tilting formulation, in which the value function biases the denoising distribution toward trajectories with higher expected multi-agent return. The framework is evaluated in a simulated maze environment with four mobile robots. Experimental results show that the proposed value-guided diffusion planning reduces the inter-agent interference rate from 55.4% to 41.8%, demonstrating that coordination can be effectively achieved while preserving the scalability of decentralized trajectory generation. These results suggest that MARL-based value guidance can effectively introduce coordination into decentralized generative planners without requiring a fully joint multi-robot model.

Suk Ki Lee, Venkata Sai Deepak Mutta, Hyunwoong Ko

School of Manufacturing Systems and Networks, Arizona State University, Mesa, AZ · Michael W. Hall School of Mechanical Engineering, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS

Multi-Robot Motion Planning Diffusion-Based Planning Multi-Robot Coordination

May 29, 2026cs.RO

Can Aerial VLA Models Cooperate? Evaluating Closed-Loop Air-Ground Coordination with CARLA-Air

Recent aerial vision-language-action (VLA) models show promising single-UAV capabilities, such as tracking moving objects and navigating to language-specified landmarks. However, it remains unclear whether these capabilities can transfer to air-ground cooperation, where a UAV and a UGV must act jointly in a shared, closed-loop physical world. We study this question with CARLA-Air, a single-process air-ground evaluation environment that unifies CARLA and AirSim inside one Unreal Engine runtime. By sharing the same world state, physics tick, and sensing pipeline, CARLA-Air enables physically consistent UAV--UGV interaction and precise measurement of simulation-timestamp alignment and effective coordination latency. Using CARLA-Air, we evaluate representative aerial VLA and planning baselines on two complementary diagnostic tasks: moving-platform landing and occlusion-recovery escort. The results show that current aerial VLA models can often track or follow a ground partner, but struggle to convert this single-agent competence into stable cooperative behavior. State prompting provides limited benefit, and naive bidirectional interaction fails to consistently improve performance and can amplify errors for most baselines. These findings suggest that, under the tested text-based cue interfaces, zero-shot cooperative air-ground VLA requires three components beyond the current paradigm: explicit partner-state grounding, low-latency action coordination, and team-level objective alignment. Our code is available at https://github.com/louiszengCN/CarlaAir.

Tianle Zeng, Yanci Wen, Xueang Yu +1

Southern University of Science and Technology · Fudan University

VLM Evaluation Aerial Robotics Robotics Simulation Multi-Robot Coordination Vision-Language-Action Models

May 29, 2026cs.RO

Trajectory Planning for Non-Communicating Mobile Robots using Inverse Optimal Control

To enable an efficient interaction of non-communicating mobile robots in collision avoidance scenarios, we present a novel combined trajectory planning and prediction algorithm. Inverse optimal control is used to estimate unknown goal states of all robots based on observed past trajectories. Each robot also takes the perspective of other robots in considering self-prediction and solves a joint prediction problem using the estimated goal states. The resulting predictions are then considered for planning. Simulation results of scenarios with 2-8 robots show that the median of the durations until all vehicles reach their goals is 9.8 % faster compared to planning with constant acceleration based estimated goal states. Moreover, the proposed approach never leads to the solver being unable to find a solution to the planning or prediction problem.

Nina Majer, Yannick Epple, Xin Ye +2

FZI Research Center for Information Technology, Haid-und-Neu-Str.10-14, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany · Institute of Control Systems, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Kaiserstraße 12, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany

Multi-Robot Motion Planning Trajectory Generation Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction Multi-Robot Coordination Robot Collision Avoidance

May 28, 2026cs.RO

FLIP: Real-Time and Resilient Formation Planning for Large-Scale DIstributed Swarms via Point Cloud Registration

Traditional large-scale formation planning either oversimplify the formation representation which leads to poor performance, or they employ complete collaborative relationships, which results in excessive computational load. To achieve high-performance and large-scale formation planning, we transform the Optimal Formation Position Sequence \cite{c1} (OFPS) calculation problem into a spatiotemporal Point Cloud Registration (PCR) problem. Each agent derives its OFPS by distributively computing the matching result between current positions and the desired formation positions of all other agents. Then each agent optimizes the cooperative formation trajectory by using OFPS. We leverage the PCR method with outlier rejection to rapidly perform large-scale formation position registration. This prevents suboptimal trajectories and failed agents from propagating through the cooperative network and affecting more agents. Consequently, we uniformly achieve resilient, efficient, and distributed trajectory planning for large-scale swarms. The effectiveness and the superiority of the proposed method are demonstrated through large-scale simulations of 120-drone formation, and rigorous benchmarking against state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

Yuan Zhou, Guangtong Xu, Zhenyu Hou +2

Institute of Cyber-Systems and Control, College of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China · Huzhou Institute, Zhejiang University, Huzhou 313000, China

Multi-Robot Formation Control Multi-Robot Motion Planning Swarm Robotics Multi-Robot Coordination

May 28, 2026cs.RO

A Progress-Aware Leader-Follower Midair Docking System for Dual-Drone Aerial Manipulation

Reliable midair docking between small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is essential for modular aerial cooperation and manipulation, but it requires precise relative-pose control and repeatable platform under tight thrust and payload constraints. We present a dual-drone docking platform where two quadrotors operate in a leader-follower formation and dock using a lightweight modular frame with passive magnetic latching. A progress-aware mission supervisor manages phase transitions: approach, alignment, capture, and settle. This platform integrates a complete hardware-software stack (ROS 2 with Crazyflie/PX4 interfaces) and synchronized logging for benchmark evaluation. We evaluate the platform in simulation and real-world experiments using quantitative metrics such as formation error, baseline and yaw consistency, docking success rate, time-to-dock, and failure-mode statistics. The platform enables statistically grounded comparison of docking supervision and synchronization strategies and provides a practical testbed for modular aerial cooperation and repeatable midair aerial manipulation.

Yifan Cai, Jan Ming Kevin Tan, Xiangqi Li +3

Department of Computer Science, University College London, London, United Kingdom · Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Aerial Robotics Multi-Robot Coordination Quadrotor Control Aerial Manipulation

May 28, 2026cs.RO

Decentralized LLM-Driven Coordination of Acoustic Robots for Contactless Object Manipulation

Natural language interfaces can simplify interaction with multi-robot systems, especially when non-expert users need to issue high-level commands. Acoustic manipulation using ultrasonic phased arrays also enables contactless object handling for applications such as healthcare, laboratory automation, and precision transport. However, combining large language models (LLMs) with distributed acoustic mobile robots remains underexplored. This paper presents a decentralized framework for natural language-driven coordination of acoustic robots for contactless object manipulation. The system converts spoken instructions into executable multi-robot task plans using Whisper-based speech recognition, LLM-based semantic parsing, structured JSON task representation, and distributed scheduling. The JSON schema encodes robot assignments, temporal dependencies, spatial constraints, and synchronization requirements for sequential, parallel, and synchronized execution. The system is implemented on two TurtleBot3-based acoustic robots, each equipped with an ultrasonic phased array for contactless object transport. Experiments were conducted in three scenarios: sequential execution, parallel multi-robot transport, and synchronized cooperative manipulation. The system achieved task success rates of 96 percent for sequential tasks, 86 percent for parallel execution, and 70 percent for synchronized collaborative transport. These results show that natural language commands can be transformed into distributed robot actions for contactless manipulation, highlighting the potential of LLM-driven automation for human-robot interaction in distributed robotic systems.

Yingying Wang, Narsimlu Kemsaram, Sriram Subramanian

Department of Computer Science, University College London, United Kingdom. · Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Multi-Robot Coordination Human-Robot Interaction

May 28, 2026cs.RO

Structured interactions improve distributed coordination beyond model scaling in a real-world multi-robot system

Scaling individual robot capabilities is common but costly. Here we investigate a system-level design question in real-world multi-robot coordination: given matched hardware budgets, does restructuring communication among robots yield larger gains than increasing onboard model size? Using a representative transport-and-mapping task with 10 physical robots (5 runs per condition, 60 runs total), we find that switching from fully connected to modular hierarchical interactions improves normalised performance by 47 points (0--100), whereas doubling neural network hidden size yields at most 9 points. Nested mixed-effects model comparisons show a substantially larger improvement in model fit for topology than for scale. The pattern is confirmed in independent SMAC replications; heterogeneous benchmark reanalyses provide secondary supporting consistency checks rather than primary evidence. Performance saturation beyond 1024 hidden units is observed in simulation-calibrated extrapolation, not directly on hardware. These results indicate that interaction structure can play a dominant role within the tested system and task setting, while broader quantitative generalisation remains to be established.

Junping Wang, Zhizhong Zhang, Yongqiang Tang +5

1*State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No.95 Zhongguancun East Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100190, Beijing, China. · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, No.19(A) Yuquan Road, Shijingshan District, Beijing, 100049, Beijing, China. · 5Liupanshan Laboratory, Ningxia University, No.489, Helanshan West Road, Xixia District, Yingchuan, 750021, Ningxia, China. +2

Multi-Robot Systems Multi-Robot Coordination Multi-Agent Communication

May 26, 2026cs.RO

SCALE-COMM: Shared, Contrastively-Aligned Latent Embeddings for MARL Communication

Emergent communication enables partially observant Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) to coordinate effectively in decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) settings. However, existing approaches often struggle with unstable communication protocols, ungrounded message semantics, and interference between communication learning and policy optimization, leading to degraded coordination over time. We propose SCALE-COMM (Shared, Contrastively-Aligned Latent Embeddings for COMMunication), a self-supervised framework for learning compact, stable, and policy-relevant communication representations. SCALE-COMM decouples communication learning from policy optimization by training low-dimensional latent messages that capture task-relevant planning and traffic information, while enforcing consistency across agents and time. Across standard MARL benchmarks and a realistic warehouse coordination task, SCALE-COMM consistently outperforms existing communication frameworks in both representation quality and task performance. The learned communication space yields improved stability, sample efficiency, and throughput under policy fine-tuning, demonstrating the effectiveness of representation-driven communication for scalable multi-agent coordination.

Mahmoud Abouelyazid, Eman Hammad

Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

Multi-Robot Coordination Decentralized MARL Multi-Agent Communication Emergent Communication

May 26, 2026cs.RO

Multi-Robot Box Transport over Different Surfaces with Decentralized Role-based Proportional Control

Collaborative transport of objects via pushing by multiple robots has many applications, ranging from construction and warehouse environments to post disaster debris clean-up. Achieving collaborative transport over surfaces with different inclination and friction properties however poses unique challenges. To address these challenges, this paper presents an asynchronous decentralized task and motion planning approach for transporting rectangular boxes of varying mass over flat, uphill and downhill terrain. Such a decentralized approach alleviates communication, synchronization and consensus needs and mitigates single point of failure issues. Our approach, called R2P2 or Roles with Rules and Proportional-control Primitive, assigns roles (e.g., push, support and prevent) to robots based on rules cognizant of the mode of manipulation needed (box rotation vs translation); this is followed by either rule-based control or proportional control of robot velocity based on the roles. Each robot is assumed to observe the location and heading of self and the box in executing the role and controls. R2P2 is evaluated with a six-robot team deployed in a simulator built using NVIDIA IsaacSim -- demonstrating generalizability across different surface friction/inclination and box mass scenarios, and better success rate compared to a standard virtual-leader-follower method. R2P2 is also successfully validated with a physical experiment, where it is executed onboard four turtlebots tasked with moving a 1.2 kg box.

Aditya Bhatt, Himavarshini Yarragangu, Urvish Shah +2

Mechanical & Aerospace Eng., University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY

Robotic Control Multi-Robot Motion Planning Multi-Robot Coordination Multi-Robot Task Allocation

May 25, 2026cs.RO

Collaborative Navigation and Exploration with $β$ -Sparse Gaussian Processes

Collaborative navigation of heterogeneous robots in unknown environments poses significant challenges due to sensing, communication, and computational limitations. In this work, a lead robot navigates toward a target while a mobile sensor robot (e.g., a drone) assists by transmitting information about its locally observed map under bandwidth constraints. We propose a framework that enables the sensor to jointly select its transmitted map points and navigation actions online, while also predicting unexplored regions of the environment. To this end, we present

β

-Sparse Gaussian Processes, a robust variational sparse Gaussian Process model for task-aware inducing point selection under cardinality constraints. Furthermore, we develop an action-selection strategy that balances task relevance with exploration. Simulations on Mars and Earth maps show that the framework can reduce path cost by 18% relative to no communication and decrease transmitted information by 76% compared to raw-data transmission baselines.

Evangelos Psomiadis, Dipankar Maity, Panagiotis Tsiotras

D. Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA, USA · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UNC Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA

Multi-Robot Systems Robot Navigation Informative Path Planning Multi-Robot Exploration Gaussian Processes Multi-Robot Coordination+1

May 24, 2026cs.RO

Micro-Swarm Locomotion Optimization in Dynamic Flow using Multi-Objective Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Coordinating micro-robotic swarms in realistic, time-dependent fluid environments remains a major challenge for biomedical and environmental applications. We present a hybrid CFD-MO-MARL (Computational Fluid Dynamics-Multi Objective-Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning) framework that couples a high-fidelity incompressible Navier--Stokes solver with decentralized proximal policy optimization to learn swarm control policies in oscillatory flow. Sixteen magnetically actuated micro-robots were simulated to navigate a pulsatile arterial waveform within a 2 mm channel while jointly optimizing upstream progression, energy efficiency, and motion smoothness. Conflicting objectives are resolved using Projected Conflicting Gradient (PCGrad) surgery. Without PCGrad, energy and smoothness rewards collapse during training, demonstrating that gradient conflict resolution is essential for stable multi-objective learning. The converged policy achieves progress rewards of 6.5-7.0, energy efficiency of 0.63-0.65, and smoothness of 0.97-0.99, outperforming brute-force baselines by more than 8 reward units on the primary objective. Training reveals three emergent behaviors not encoded in the reward function: hydrodynamic throttling formations that reduce peak flow velocities, a cycle-synchronized ratchet mechanism that exploits flow reversals for upstream movement, and individualized final-approach strategies near the target boundary. These results demonstrate that physically realistic fluid--agent interactions can be integrated directly into multi-objective reinforcement learning, providing a scalable framework for micro-swarm control in biomedical navigation, environmental monitoring, and microfluidic systems.

Josef Berman, Oren Gal

The Hatter Department of Marine Technologies, Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences, University of Haifa, Israel.

Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning Multi-Agent System Optimization Swarm Robotics Multi-Robot Coordination Decentralized MARL Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

May 24, 2026cs.NI

Scaling up Energy-Aware Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Mission-Oriented Drone Networks with Individual Reward

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown wide applicability in collaborative systems such as autonomous driving and smart cities for its ability of learning through interaction. With the recent development of drone networks, researchers have also applied MARL to address the trajectory planning problems. However, the dynamic environment and the limited battery capacity are still challenging for using MARL to achieve efficient collaborative task execution. In this paper, we propose an energy-aware MARL model as an attempt to tackle these challenges, leveraging Deep Q-Networks (DQN) with \emph{individual reward functions} driven by the task execution progress and the remaining battery of drones. We conduct a set of simulation studies for the proposed mode and compare it with the shared reward MARL~\cite{Li2022MARL} to explore the impact of credit assignment in MARL. The results indicate that our proposed model can achieve at least 80% success rate regardless of the task locations and lengths. Similar to the shared reward mode, the individual reward mode can achieve a better success rate when the task density is high, and it can hit nearly a 100% success rate when task density gets close to 40%. The true advantage of our proposed model with individual reward is revealed when scaling up the environment. The comparison to the shared reward MARL shows that the our proposed model is more robust towards the change of the environment size and agent numbers. It can achieve higher success rate with fewer steps due to the clarity of the goal which improves energy efficiency even better.

Changling Li, Ying Li

Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich, 8092, Zurich, Switzerland · Department of Computer Science, Colby College, 04901, Waterville, ME, USA

Reinforcement Learning Credit Assignment in RL Multi-Robot Coordination Cooperative MARL

May 21, 2026cs.RO

Scout-Assisted Planning for Heterogeneous Robot Teams under Partially Known Environments

Autonomous robot teams navigating partially known environments face costly backtracking when ground robots encounter blocked roads that are only revealed upon physical traversal. We address this with Scout-Assisted Planning, a heterogeneous planning framework in which scouting Unmanned Aerial Vehicles proactively gather environmental information to improve Unmanned Ground Vehicle navigation. To focus scouting on the most consequential edges, we propose Information Gain-based Action Pruning, which scores candidate scouting actions by their expected impact on ground robot behavior. Since exact Information Gain-based Action Pruning computation is prohibitively expensive, we develop a Graph Neural Network based model that predicts information gain values directly from graph structure and belief state, reducing planning time to real-time levels without sacrificing solution quality. Experiments across three environment types show that SAP with Information Gain Action Pruning reduces ground robot travel cost by 31.9--37.7% over the Canadian Traveler Problem baseline, and outperforms proximity-based scouting guidance by an additional 8--14%, confirming that principled information-gain-guided scouting is both more effective and computationally feasible for real-world deployment

Hoang-Dung Bui, Abhish Khanal, Raihan Islam Arnob +1

George Mason University

Robot Navigation Informative Path Planning Multi-Robot Coordination Motion Planning

May 21, 2026cs.RO

A Visitation Grid for Complete Coverage Foraging in Robot Swarms

The complete collection of sparse resources in large, unknown environments remains a challenging problem for autonomous robot swarms. Previous studies have shown that a substantial portion of total mission time is consumed during the final stage of collection, where only a small fraction of randomly scattered resources remain. Consequently, many existing swarm foraging algorithms (search and collection) focus on collecting most resources within a limited time window, rather than improving end-stage efficiency for collecting all resources. We propose a grid-based stochastic foraging strategy that explicitly reduces redundant visits and accelerates late-stage collection. The unknown search area is partitioned into a grid map, which is maintained by a lightweight central server. To maintain scalability, both robots and the server operate within limited memory and computational constraints. The server updates the grid-level visitation counts based on robot-reported locations, producing a global estimate of the exploration density. For each new foraging trip, a robot selects its next search area from a local 3 X 3 neighborhood of grids probabilistically with the lowest visitation count, thus biasing exploration toward under-visited regions while maintaining stochasticity. Extensive simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed strategy consistently outperforms the canonical centrally placed baseline foraging algorithm (CPFA). Compared to CPFA, the proposed method reduces the total collection time by up to 33% and improves collection efficiency by more than 48% during the final stage of the mission. These results indicate that the proposed strategy is robust, flexible, and scalable for near-complete and complete resource collection in robot swarms and can serve as a general enhancement for stochastic swarm foraging methods under limited onboard resources.

Qi Arturo Gonzalez, Yifeng Gao, Li Zhang +1

Department of Computer Science The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Texas, United States

Multi-Robot Systems Swarm Robotics Multi-Robot Exploration Multi-Robot Coordination

May 21, 2026cs.RO

Auction-Consensus Algorithm with Learned Bidding Scheme for Multi-Robot Systems

Multi-Robot Task Allocation (MRTA) is a central challenge in decentralized multi-agent systems, where teams of robots must cooperatively assign and execute tasks under limited communication while optimizing global performance objectives. Auction-consensus algorithms, such as the Consensus-Based Bundle Algorithm (CBBA), provide scalable decentralized coordination with provable convergence, but rely on hand-crafted greedy scoring functions that often lead to suboptimal task allocations. This paper proposes a learning-enhanced auction-consensus framework in which CBBA's deterministic bidding mechanism is replaced by a neural bidding policy trained using reinforcement learning. Under a centralized training and decentralized execution paradigm, agents learn to compute task bids from partial local observations while retaining the standard auction and consensus phases for decentralized coordination. The learned bidding policy is trained using Proximal Policy Optimization with rewards shaped by proximity to globally optimal solutions obtained via mixed-integer linear programming. Multiple neural architectures are evaluated, including a Neural Additive Model, the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model, and the Set Transformer Model. Experimental results across varying swarm sizes demonstrate that learned bidding policies can improve solution quality over classical CBBA while preserving decentralized execution. The proposed approach highlights the effectiveness of integrating reinforcement learning with classical distributed coordination algorithms, offering a scalable pathway toward higher-quality decentralized multi-robot task allocation.

Jose Rodriguez, Constantine Tarawneh, Sven Koenig +2

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), Edinburg, USA · Department of Mechanical Engineering, UTRGV, Edinburg, TX, USA · Department of Computer Science, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine +1

Multi-Robot Coordination Multi-Robot Task Allocation

May 21, 2026cs.RO

Higher Order Reasoning for Collaborative Communicationless Mobile Robot Operations

In communicationless environments, multi-robot systems must operate without the constant information exchange that many coordination strategies typically assume. This paper presents a novel dynamic epistemic planning framework that enables implicit coordination and long horizon planning through higher-order reasoning among robots. With our approach, robots form and propagate higher-order belief particles, update world beliefs using Bayesian inference, and select actions via a behavior tree that anticipates teammates' likely decisions. A temporally aware Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) controller integrates this reasoning into low-level execution, allowing robots to plan intercepts and adapt trajectories under partial observability. The proposed framework is evaluated in both simulations and physical experiments, where it consistently reduces task completion time compared to a first-order baseline, demonstrating that epistemic logic can serve as a robust foundation for resilient coordination in communication-restricted domains.

Jonathan Reasoner, Nicola Bezzo

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA

Belief-Space Planning Multi-Robot Motion Planning Multi-Robot Coordination Multi-Agent Reasoning

May 20, 2026cs.RO

Learning Altruistic Collaboration in Heterogeneous Multi-Team Systems

This paper studies heterogeneous multi-team collaboration through dynamic robot allocation, where robots are treated as transferable resources. Leveraging Hamilton's rule from ecology as an altruistic decision-making mechanism, we propose a multi-team collaborative resource allocation framework with heterogeneous capabilities, transfer costs, and capability-dependent contributions. The resulting allocation problem is combinatorial and is shown to be NP-hard. To address scalability, we develop a graph neural network policy under centralized training and decentralized execution that approximates the altruistic allocations based on Hamilton's rule. The model operates over the team interaction graph and predicts robot-level transfer decisions and next robot-to-team assignments. The proposed approach is validated in a firefighting scenario through simulations and experiments, demonstrating that the learned policy achieves near-optimal performance while scaling to larger systems.

Riwa Karam, Ruoyu Lin, Brooks A. Butler +1

Samueli School of Engineering, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA · University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599, USA

Multi-Agent Collaboration Multi-Robot Coordination Multi-Robot Task Allocation

May 20, 2026cs.RO

Mind the Gaps: Multi-Robot Feedback-Driven Ergodic Coverage in Unknown Environments

In this work, we address the problem of multi-robot adaptive coverage, where teams of robots perform dynamic sampling by continuously adjusting their positions to collect data in an environment. This task can be challenging, particularly when robots must be efficiently allocated to new sampling locations over time. Ergodic search methods optimize robot trajectories by ensuring that the robots' time-averaged spatial distribution aligns with the spatial distribution of environmental information. While these methods promote effective exploration provided a target distribution, they often fail to account for unknown prior distributions of the environment. To overcome this limitation, we propose an adaptive coverage strategy that utilizes real-time feedback from an environmental model to adjust robot sampling behavior in response to unknown conditions. Our approach enhances traditional ergodic trajectory optimization by constructing a target spatial information distribution based on parametric models of the environment, which are updated online. This strategy assumes that the environment is either static or changes slowly compared to the robot's motion. Our framework allows robots to dynamically prioritize regions of high interest, improving coverage efficiency, synthesizing effective control policies for individual agents, and optimizing resource use in settings with unknown prior distributions. We validate our approach through simulations, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing coverage and resource allocation.

Thales Costa Silva, Nora Ayanian

Department of Computer Science at Brown University, Providence-RI, USA.

Trajectory Optimization Multi-Robot Systems Exploration-Exploitation Tradeoff Multi-Robot Coordination

May 20, 2026cs.RO

Distributed Multi-Coverage for Robot Swarms

Autonomous drone swarms deployed for surveillance, environmental monitoring, and infrastructure inspection must maintain reliable coverage of critical assets despite robot failures. This requires multicoverage: each asset must be observed by multiple robots for redundancy, with coverage requirements varying by asset importance. While recent work has solved the centralized problem optimally using integer programming, practical deployments face constraints that demand distributed solutions: robots operate with limited communication ranges, onboard computation restricts global planning, and partial system failures must not cause mission abort. We present a distributed multicoverage algorithm for robot swarms operating with local sensing, local communication, and no global coordination.

Mariem Guitouni, Aaron T. Becker

University of Houston, Texas, USA, 77204

Aerial Robotics Multi-Robot Systems Swarm Robotics Multi-Robot Coordination