Robots and humans coordinate tasks with smarter communication decisions
Communication-Aware Heterogeneous Graph Learning for Decentralized Multi-Human Multi-Robot Task Allocation
Robotics
Summary
Coordinating tasks between many humans and robots is tricky when communication is limited and delayed. The authors created CommHG, a method that helps robots decide when to ask for help from people or share information with each other. This system learns these communication choices alongside task assignments to work better in real time. They tested CommHG with teams of up to 16 robots, 6 humans, and over 100 tasks, finding it improved team performance compared to other methods.
What this means in practice
- •For industrial automation teams: Improve coordination between human operators and robot workers in factories where communication is limited or delayed.
- •For disaster response teams: Enable efficient allocation of tasks among first responders and robots in complex, communication-constrained environments.
Authors
Ziqin Yuan, Ruiqi Wang, Baijian Yang, Byung-Cheol Min
Abstract
Multi-human multi-robot (MH-MR) teams combine robotic autonomy with human expertise, but effective task allocation requires coordinating scarce, dynamically available human support with distributed robot execution. Limited robot-robot and human-robot communication further complicates this coupling by delaying information exchange and supervisory intervention. We introduce CommHG, a communication-aware heterogeneous graph learning framework for decentralized MH-MR task allocation. CommHG represents coupled human-robot-task interactions through local graphs conditioned on information availability and age. Learned communication actions enable robots to decide when and which operator to query, and when to share information with peers. Allocation and communication are jointly optimized through cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, allowing the team to acquire useful information while managing limited communication and supervisory resources. We also introduce a benchmark integrating heterogeneous humans and robots, dynamic tasks and operational states, and constrained robot-robot and bidirectional human-robot links. Experiments across heterogeneous teams with up to 16 robots, 6 humans, and 112 tasks show that CommHG improves timely weighted mission completion as coordination scale increases, outperforming the strongest baseline in the Large scenario.