Multi-Robot Coordination

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Overview

Multi-robot coordination studies how robots with shared or complementary goals work together in settings such as exploration, transport, warehouses, and aerial-ground missions. Approaches include task allocation and scheduling, joint or distributed motion planning, formation and feedback control, and learned policies that use local observations, communication, or demonstrations. Work increasingly combines these methods with safety constraints, uncertainty-aware replanning, and language or vision models, with evaluation spanning simulation, benchmarks, and physical robot teams. A central challenge is balancing the efficiency and global awareness of centralized planning against the scalability, resilience, and limited communication of decentralized teams, especially when robots or environments differ from those seen in training.

Latest papers

CardsList

328 papers50 papers in the last four weeks, up 22% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

  1. Perception-Aware Communication-Free Multi-UAV Coordination in the Wild

    Mar 9, 2026Manuel Boldrer, Michal Kamler, Afzal Ahmad +1Multi-Robot CoordinationUAV Navigation

    Department of Cybernetics, Czech Technical University in Prague, Karlovo namesti 13, 121 35 Prague 2, Czechia.

  2. DeReCo: Decoupling Representation and Coordination Learning for Object-Adaptive Decentralized Multi-Robot Cooperative Grasping and Lifting

    Mar 9, 2026Kazuki Shibata, Ryosuke Sota, Shandil Dhiresh Bosch +3Multi-Robot Cargo TransportationMulti-Robot Coordination

    All the authors are with the Division of Information Science, Graduate School of Science and Technology, Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Nara, Japan. · Shandil Dhiresh Bosch is with the Department of Cognitive Robotics, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands.

  3. C2^2-Explorer: Contiguity-Driven Task Allocation with Connectivity-Aware Task Representation for Decentralized Multi-UAV Exploration

    Mar 8, 2026Xinlu Yan, Mingjie Zhang, Yuhao Fang +5Multi-Robot ExplorationMulti-Robot Task Allocation

    School of Intelligence Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China · Robotics and Autonomous Systems Thrust, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, Guangdong, China · Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China

  4. SwiftBot: A Decentralized Platform for LLM-Powered Federated Robotic Task Execution

    Mar 7, 2026YueMing Zhang, Shuai Xu, Zhengxiong Li +3Multi-Robot CoordinationEdge Computing

    California State University, Long Beach, USA · Case Western Reserve University, USA · University of Colorado Denver, USA +2

  5. ACLM: ADMM-Based Distributed Model Predictive Control for Collaborative Loco-Manipulation

    Mar 7, 2026Ziyi Zhou, Pengyuan Shu, Ruize Cao +2Model Predictive ControlMulti-Robot Coordination

    The Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, Georgia Institute of Technology.

  6. Energy-Efficient Collaborative Transport of Tether-Suspended Payloads via Rotating Equilibrium

    Mar 7, 2026Eric Foss, Andrew Tai, Carlo Bosio +1Aerial RoboticsMulti-Robot Coordination

    High Performance Robotics Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California Berkeley, CA 94720, United States.

  7. Collaborative Planning with Concurrent Synchronization for Operationally Constrained UAV-UGV Teams

    Mar 6, 2026Zihao Deng, Qianhuang Li, Peng Gao +4Multi-Robot CoordinationMulti-Robot Motion Planning

    Zihao Deng, Qianhuang Li, Donghyun Kim, and Hao Zhang are with the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, 01002, USA. · Peng Gao is with North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, 27695, USA. · Maggie Wigness and John Rogers are with the U.S. Army DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory (ARL), Adelphi, MD, 20783, USA.

  8. Safe Consensus of Cooperative Manipulation with Hierarchical Event-Triggered Control Barrier Functions

    Mar 6, 2026Simiao Zhuang, Bingkun Huang, Zewen YangControl Barrier FunctionsMulti-Agent Control

    Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI), Technical University of Munich (TUM), 80992 Munich, Germany

  9. ADM-DP: Adaptive Dynamic Modality Diffusion Policy through Vision-Tactile-Graph Fusion for Multi-Agent Manipulation

    Feb 25, 2026Enyi Wang, Wen Fan, Dandan ZhangMulti-Robot CoordinationDiffusion Policy

    Department of Bioengineering, Imperial-X Initiative, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom.

  10. Cooperative-Competitive Team Play of Real-World Craft Robots

    Feb 24, 2026Rui Zhao, Xihui Li, Yizheng Zhang +6Cooperative MARLMulti-Robot Coordination

    The authors are with Tencent Robotics X Laboratory, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. · The author is with Tsinghua University, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China.

  11. Rendezvous and Docking of Mobile Ground Robots for Efficient Transportation Systems

    Feb 23, 2026Lars Fischer, Daniel Flögel, Sören HohmannRoboticsMulti-Robot Coordination

    FZI Research Center for Information Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany · Institute of Control Systems, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

  12. Safe and Interpretable Multimodal Path Planning for Multi-Agent Cooperation

    Feb 22, 2026Haojun Shi, Suyu Ye, Katherine M. Guerrerio +5Multi-Agent PlanningMulti-Robot Coordination

    Johns Hopkins University

  13. Distributed Virtual Model Control for Scalable Human-Robot Collaboration in Shared Workspace

    Feb 19, 2026Yi Zhang, Omar Faris, Chapa Sirithunge +3Human-Robot CollaborationRobot Safety

    Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1PZ, United Kingdom

  14. MOSAIC: Modular Scalable Autonomy for Intelligent Coordination of Heterogeneous Robotic Teams

    Jan 30, 2026David Oberacker, Julia Richter, Philip Arm +10Multi-Robot SystemsMulti-Robot Exploration

    FZI Forschungszentrum für Informatik, Karlsruhe, Germany · Machine Intelligence and Robotics Lab (MaiRo), Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany · Robotic Systems Lab (RSL), ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland +1

  15. From Perception to Symbolic Task Planning: Vision-Language Guided Human-Robot Collaborative Structured Assembly

    Jan 2, 2026Yanyi Chen, Min DengHuman-Robot CollaborationRobotic Assembly

    Department of Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409, USA

  16. Flocking phase transition and threat responses in bio-inspired autonomous drone swarms

    Dec 24, 2025Matthieu Verdoucq, Dari Trendafilov, Clément Sire +3Aerial RoboticsMulti-Robot Systems

    Ecole Nationale de l’Aviation Civile, Université de Toulouse, France · Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, Centre de Biologie Intégrative (CBI), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) & Université de Toulouse – Paul Sabatier, France · Laboratoire de Physique Théorique, CNRS & Université de Toulouse – Paul Sabatier, France

  17. Collaborative Continuum Robots: A Survey from an Automation-System Perspective

    Dec 22, 2025Xinyu Li, Qian Tang, Guoxin Yin +4Multi-Robot CoordinationContinuum Robot Control

  18. Census-Based Population Autonomy For Distributed Robotic Teaming

    Nov 4, 2025Tyler M. Paine, Anastasia Bizyaeva, Michael R. BenjaminMulti-Robot CoordinationDistributed Optimization

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA · Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Woods Hole, MA 02543, USA · Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA

  19. Few-Shot Demonstration-Driven Task Coordination and Trajectory Execution for Multi-Robot Systems

    Oct 17, 2025Taehyeon Kim, Vishnunandan L. N. Venkatesh, Byung-Cheol MinRobot Motion GenerationImitation Learning

    Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA · Astemo Americas, Inc., Farmington Hills, MI, USA · Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN, USA

  20. Prompting Robot Teams with Natural Language

    Sep 29, 2025Eduardo Sebastián, Nicolas Pfitzer, Ajay Shankar +1Large Language Model-Based Robot PlanningMulti-Robot Coordination

    Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, UK · Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

  21. Optimization without Future Compromises? Decentralized Coordination via Collective and Reinforcement Learning

    Sep 22, 2025Chuhao Qin, Evangelos PournarasMulti-Agent System OptimizationMulti-Agent Coordination

    School of Computer Science, University of Leeds, UK

  22. MIMIC-D: Multi-modal Imitation for MultI-agent Coordination with Decentralized Diffusion Policies

    Sep 17, 2025Dayi Dong, Maulik Bhatt, Seoyeon Choi +1Multi-Agent CoordinationDiffusion Policy

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94709, USA

  23. Distributed Event-Triggered Distance-Based Formation Control for Multi-Agent Systems

    Sep 15, 2025Evangelos Psomiadis, Panagiotis TsiotrasMulti-Robot Formation ControlMulti-Agent Control

    D. Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332-0150, USA

  24. Asynchronous Indulgent Gathering of Opaque Robots

    Sep 12, 2025Subhajit Pramanick, Saswata Jana, Partha Sarathi Mandal +1Multi-Robot Coordination

    University of Wroclaw, Poland · Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India · Kent State University, USA

  25. Decentralized Vision-Based Autonomous Aerial Wildlife Monitoring

    Aug 20, 2025Makram Chahine, William Yang, Alaa Maalouf +6Multi-Robot CoordinationDrone-Based Wildlife Monitoring

    Project CETI, New York 10003, NY, USA · CSAIL MIT, Cambridge MA 02139, USA · SEAS Harvard University, Boston MA 02134, USA

  26. Simulation-based planning of Motion Sequences for Automated Procedure Optimization in Multi-Robot Assembly Cells

    Jul 31, 2025Loris Schneider, Marc Ungen, Elias Huber +1Multi-Robot Motion PlanningMulti-Robot Coordination

    Institute for Material Handling and Logistics (IFL), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 76131, Germany · Bosch Corporate Research, Robert Bosch GmbH, 71272 Renningen, Germany

  27. D4orm: Multi-Robot Trajectories with Dynamics-aware Diffusion Denoised Deformations

    Mar 15, 2025Yuhao Zhang, Keisuke Okumura, Heedo Woo +2Multi-Robot Motion PlanningConstrained Motion Planning

    University of Cambridge · UK · National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) +1

  28. An Optimal Algorithm for Changing from Latitudinal to Longitudinal Formation of Autonomous Aircraft Squadrons

    Dec 1, 2017Paulo André Sperandio Giacomin, Elder Moreira HemerlyMulti-Robot Formation ControlAerial Robotics

    Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz Departamento de Ciências Exatas e Tecnológicas - Área de Informática Ilhéus-BA, Brasil · Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica Departamento de Sistemas e Controle - Divisão de Engenharia Eletrônica São José dos Campos-SP, Brasil