Papers for

robot teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Robots share beliefs for better teamwork and exploration

Exact Fusion and Coordinated Exploration in Multi-Robot Active Inference

Abstract: Robot teams that learn a common environment model exchange belief summaries and plan by the expected information gain of their actions. Under conjugate exponential-family beliefs the shared belief is counted once per robot at two points: at fusion, the product of local posteriors counts the common prior $n$ times, and at planning, every robot scores its plan under the same belief and the team converges on the same unknown. Both errors are removed by adding evidence increments to the shared natural parameter, realized increments at fusion and expected increments at planning. The expected increment of a committed teammate gives the next robot its conditional gain; corrected gains sum to the joint gain, the redundancy removed equals the total correlation of the planned observation streams, and sequential commitment keeps the $1/2$ greedy guarantee. The expected increment is exact for Gaussian beliefs with fixed sampling paths and for Dirichlet beliefs under the novelty approximation of discrete active inference, whose team objective has a closed concave form within an explicit bound of the exact mutual information, and fails for finite hypothesis classes, where a short exact enumeration replaces it. Experiments on cooperative RockSample, foraging, and field monitoring show that fusion correction leaves exploration redundancy unchanged, anticipated evidence removes it, and sequential commitment recovers most of the value of centralized joint planning at cost linear in the team size.

Tue 15 SeptRoboticsMultiagent Systems
The gist
When groups of robots work together to explore or monitor an area, they need to share and combine what each one knows without repeating the same information. The authors explain how to combine these shared beliefs exactly, avoiding overcounting common knowledge and planning smarter actions that don’t waste effort exploring the same things multiple times. Their method ensures that the team’s combined exploration value matches what a perfectly coordinated group would achieve. They tested their ideas on tasks like cooperative rock sampling and field monitoring, showing that the approach saves effort while staying efficient even as teams grow in size.
Open → 2609.17384v1