CoCoPlan: Adaptive Coordination and Communication for Multi-robot Systems in Dynamic and Unknown Environments

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10116v1
• Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2026 06:50:21 GMT
• Title: CoCoPlan: Adaptive Coordination and Communication for Multi-robot Systems in Dynamic and Unknown Environments
• Abstract summary: Multi-robot systems can greatly enhance efficiency through coordination and collaboration.<n>Existing methods either maintain all-time connectivity, rely on fixed schedules, or adopt pairwise protocols.<n>We propose a unified framework that co-optimizes collaborative task planning and team-wise intermittent communication.
• Score: 10.496161804810473
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: 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.

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