BodyGuards: Escorting by Multiple Robots in Unknown Environment under Limited Communication

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15108v1
• Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2026 11:02:56 GMT
• Title: BodyGuards: Escorting by Multiple Robots in Unknown Environment under Limited Communication
• Abstract summary: Multi-robot systems are increasingly deployed in high-risk missions such as reconnaissance, disaster response, and subterranean operations.<n>This work focuses on task-oriented exploration to minimize the navigation time of the operator to reach its goal while ensuring safety under adversarial threats.<n>A novel escorting framework BodyGuards, is proposed to explicitly integrate seamlessly collaborative exploration, inter-robot-operator communication and escorting.
• Score: 1.9417191498842037
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Multi-robot systems are increasingly deployed in high-risk missions such as reconnaissance, disaster response, and subterranean operations. Protecting a human operator while navigating unknown and adversarial environments remains a critical challenge, especially when the communication among the operator and robots is restricted. Unlike existing collaborative exploration methods that aim for complete coverage, this work focuses on task-oriented exploration to minimize the navigation time of the operator to reach its goal while ensuring safety under adversarial threats. A novel escorting framework BodyGuards, is proposed to explicitly integrate seamlessly collaborative exploration, inter-robot-operator communication and escorting. The framework consists of three core components: (I) a dynamic movement strategy for the operator that maintains a local map with risk zones for proactive path planning; (II) a dual-mode robotic strategy combining frontier based exploration with optimized return events to balance exploration, threat detection, and intermittent communication; and (III) multi-robot coordination protocols that jointly plan exploration and information sharing for efficient escorting. Extensive human-in-the-loop simulations and hardware experiments demonstrate that the method significantly reduces operator risk and mission time, outperforming baselines in adversarial and constrained environments.

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