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Main Authors: Zhang, Xintong, Chen, Junfeng, Zhu, Yuxiao, Luo, Bing, Guo, Meng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10116
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_version_ 1866910013859037184
author Zhang, Xintong
Chen, Junfeng
Zhu, Yuxiao
Luo, Bing
Guo, Meng
author_facet Zhang, Xintong
Chen, Junfeng
Zhu, Yuxiao
Luo, Bing
Guo, Meng
contents Multi-robot systems can greatly enhance efficiency through coordination and collaboration, yet in practice, full-time communication is rarely available and interactions are constrained to close-range exchanges. Existing methods either maintain all-time connectivity, rely on fixed schedules, or adopt pairwise protocols, but none adapt effectively to dynamic spatio-temporal task distributions under limited communication, resulting in suboptimal coordination. To address this gap, we propose CoCoPlan, a unified framework that co-optimizes collaborative task planning and team-wise intermittent communication. Our approach integrates a branch-and-bound architecture that jointly encodes task assignments and communication events, an adaptive objective function that balances task efficiency against communication latency, and a communication event optimization module that strategically determines when, where and how the global connectivity should be re-established. Extensive experiments demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods by achieving a 22.4% higher task completion rate, reducing communication overhead by 58.6%, and improving the scalability by supporting up to 100 robots in dynamic environments. Hardware experiments include the complex 2D office environment and large-scale 3D disaster-response scenario.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_10116
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CoCoPlan: Adaptive Coordination and Communication for Multi-robot Systems in Dynamic and Unknown Environments
Zhang, Xintong
Chen, Junfeng
Zhu, Yuxiao
Luo, Bing
Guo, Meng
Robotics
Multi-robot systems can greatly enhance efficiency through coordination and collaboration, yet in practice, full-time communication is rarely available and interactions are constrained to close-range exchanges. Existing methods either maintain all-time connectivity, rely on fixed schedules, or adopt pairwise protocols, but none adapt effectively to dynamic spatio-temporal task distributions under limited communication, resulting in suboptimal coordination. To address this gap, we propose CoCoPlan, a unified framework that co-optimizes collaborative task planning and team-wise intermittent communication. Our approach integrates a branch-and-bound architecture that jointly encodes task assignments and communication events, an adaptive objective function that balances task efficiency against communication latency, and a communication event optimization module that strategically determines when, where and how the global connectivity should be re-established. Extensive experiments demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods by achieving a 22.4% higher task completion rate, reducing communication overhead by 58.6%, and improving the scalability by supporting up to 100 robots in dynamic environments. Hardware experiments include the complex 2D office environment and large-scale 3D disaster-response scenario.
title CoCoPlan: Adaptive Coordination and Communication for Multi-robot Systems in Dynamic and Unknown Environments
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10116