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

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Deng, Zihao, Li, Qianhuang, Gao, Peng, Wigness, Maggie, Rogers, John, Kim, Donghyun, Zhang, Hao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Deng, Zihao
Li, Qianhuang
Gao, Peng
Wigness, Maggie
Rogers, John
Kim, Donghyun
Zhang, Hao
author_facet Deng, Zihao
Li, Qianhuang
Gao, Peng
Wigness, Maggie
Rogers, John
Kim, Donghyun
Zhang, Hao
contents Collaborative planning under operational constraints is an essential capability for heterogeneous robot teams tackling complex large-scale real-world tasks. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer rapid environmental coverage, but flight time is often limited by energy constraints, whereas Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) have greater energy capacity to support long-duration missions, but movement is constrained by traversable terrain. Individually, neither can complete tasks such as environmental monitoring. Effective UAV-UGV collaboration therefore requires energy-constrained multi-UAV task planning, traversability-constrained multi-UGV path planning, and crucially, synchronized concurrent co-planning to ensure timely in-mission recharging. To enable these capabilities, we propose Collaborative Planning with Concurrent Synchronization (CoPCS), a learning-based approach that integrates a heterogeneous graph transformer for operationally constrained task encoding with a transformer decoder for joint, synchronized co-planning that enables UAVs and UGVs to act concurrently in a coordinated manner. CoPCS is trained end-to-end under a unified imitation learning paradigm. We conducted extensive experiments to evaluate CoPCS in both robotic simulations and physical robot teams. Experimental results demonstrate that our method provides the novel multi-robot capability of synchronized concurrent co-planning and substantially improves team performance. More details of this work are available on the project website: https://hcrlab.gitlab.io/project/CoPCS.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_06898
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Collaborative Planning with Concurrent Synchronization for Operationally Constrained UAV-UGV Teams
Deng, Zihao
Li, Qianhuang
Gao, Peng
Wigness, Maggie
Rogers, John
Kim, Donghyun
Zhang, Hao
Robotics
Collaborative planning under operational constraints is an essential capability for heterogeneous robot teams tackling complex large-scale real-world tasks. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer rapid environmental coverage, but flight time is often limited by energy constraints, whereas Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) have greater energy capacity to support long-duration missions, but movement is constrained by traversable terrain. Individually, neither can complete tasks such as environmental monitoring. Effective UAV-UGV collaboration therefore requires energy-constrained multi-UAV task planning, traversability-constrained multi-UGV path planning, and crucially, synchronized concurrent co-planning to ensure timely in-mission recharging. To enable these capabilities, we propose Collaborative Planning with Concurrent Synchronization (CoPCS), a learning-based approach that integrates a heterogeneous graph transformer for operationally constrained task encoding with a transformer decoder for joint, synchronized co-planning that enables UAVs and UGVs to act concurrently in a coordinated manner. CoPCS is trained end-to-end under a unified imitation learning paradigm. We conducted extensive experiments to evaluate CoPCS in both robotic simulations and physical robot teams. Experimental results demonstrate that our method provides the novel multi-robot capability of synchronized concurrent co-planning and substantially improves team performance. More details of this work are available on the project website: https://hcrlab.gitlab.io/project/CoPCS.
title Collaborative Planning with Concurrent Synchronization for Operationally Constrained UAV-UGV Teams
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06898