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Main Authors: Zhu, Lina, Cheng, Jiyu, Liu, Yuehu, Zhang, Wei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03686
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author Zhu, Lina
Cheng, Jiyu
Liu, Yuehu
Zhang, Wei
author_facet Zhu, Lina
Cheng, Jiyu
Liu, Yuehu
Zhang, Wei
contents In multi-robot collaborative area search, a key challenge is to dynamically balance the two objectives of exploring unknown areas and covering specific targets to be rescued. Existing methods are often constrained by homogeneous graph representations, thus failing to model and balance these distinct tasks. To address this problem, we propose a Dual-Attention Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (DA-HGNN) trained using deep reinforcement learning. Our method constructs a heterogeneous graph that incorporates three entity types: robot nodes, frontier nodes, and interesting nodes, as well as their historical states. The dual-attention mechanism comprises the relational-aware attention and type-aware attention operations. The relational-aware attention captures the complex spatio-temporal relationships among robots and candidate goals. Building on this relational-aware heterogeneous graph, the type-aware attention separately computes the relevance between robots and each goal type (frontiers vs. points of interest), thereby decoupling the exploration and coverage from the unified tasks. Extensive experiments conducted in interactive 3D scenarios within the iGibson simulator, leveraging the Gibson and MatterPort3D datasets, validate the superior scalability and generalization capability of the proposed approach.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_03686
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Dual-Attention Heterogeneous GNN for Multi-robot Collaborative Area Search via Deep Reinforcement Learning
Zhu, Lina
Cheng, Jiyu
Liu, Yuehu
Zhang, Wei
Robotics
In multi-robot collaborative area search, a key challenge is to dynamically balance the two objectives of exploring unknown areas and covering specific targets to be rescued. Existing methods are often constrained by homogeneous graph representations, thus failing to model and balance these distinct tasks. To address this problem, we propose a Dual-Attention Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (DA-HGNN) trained using deep reinforcement learning. Our method constructs a heterogeneous graph that incorporates three entity types: robot nodes, frontier nodes, and interesting nodes, as well as their historical states. The dual-attention mechanism comprises the relational-aware attention and type-aware attention operations. The relational-aware attention captures the complex spatio-temporal relationships among robots and candidate goals. Building on this relational-aware heterogeneous graph, the type-aware attention separately computes the relevance between robots and each goal type (frontiers vs. points of interest), thereby decoupling the exploration and coverage from the unified tasks. Extensive experiments conducted in interactive 3D scenarios within the iGibson simulator, leveraging the Gibson and MatterPort3D datasets, validate the superior scalability and generalization capability of the proposed approach.
title Dual-Attention Heterogeneous GNN for Multi-robot Collaborative Area Search via Deep Reinforcement Learning
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03686