MoRoCo: An Online Topology-Adaptive Framework for Multi-Operator Multi-Robot Coordination under Restricted Communication

Zhuoli Tian, Yanze Bao, Yuyang Zhang, Meng Guo
College of Engineering, Peking University
2025
Paper arXiv
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Illustration of the considered scenario, where multiple operators and robots are deployed in an unknown and communication-scarce environment for exploration and task execution. (A): Within one team (one operator, one UGV and one mobile manipulator), the robots coordinate via intra-team intermittent communication to actively explore the environment, while ensuring a timely feedback to the operator with a maximum latency, in the proposed “spread mode”; (B): The operator can move in the environment without losing connection with the team via the proposed interaction protocol, or as a team via the proposed “migrate mode”; (C): For remote requests that require high-bandwidth (such as inspection and remote control), the robots form a communication chain to stream real-time video to the operator via the proposed “chain mode”; (D): Robots from different teams act as temporary messengers for inter-team data exchange under a latency bound, to achieve efficient coordination.

Abstract

Fleets of autonomous robots are increasingly deployed with multiple human operators in communication-restricted environments for exploration and intervention tasks such as subterranean inspection, reconnaissance, and search-and-rescue. In these settings, communication is often limited to short-range ad-hoc links, making it difficult to coordinate exploration while supporting online human-fleet interactions. Existing work on multi-robot exploration largely focuses on information gathering itself, but pays limited attention to the fact that operators and robots issue time-critical requests during execution. These requests may require different communication structures, ranging from intermittent status delivery to sustained video streaming and teleoperation. To address this challenge, this paper presents MoRoCo, an online topology-adaptive framework for multi-operator multi-robot coordination under restricted communication. MoRoCo is built on a latency-bounded intermittent communication backbone that guarantees a prescribed delay for information collected by any robot to reach an operator, together with a detach-and-rejoin mechanism that enables online team resizing and topology reconfiguration. On top of this backbone, the framework instantiates request-consistent communication subgraphs to realize different modes of operator-robot interaction by jointly assigning robot roles, positions, and communication topology. It further supports the online decomposition and composition of these subgraphs using only local communication, allowing multiple requests to be serviced during exploration. The framework extends to heterogeneous fleets, multiple teams, and robot failures. Extensive human-in-the-loop simulations and hardware experiments demonstrate effective and reliable coordination under restricted communication.

Overall Framework

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Overall framework of MoRoCo for multi-operator multi-robot coordination under restricted communication. Built on a latency-bounded intermittent communication backbone, MoRoCo supports collaborative exploration and online request delivery via only local communication (Left). Given the current embedded graph and active requests, the framework performs online embedded graph matching to instantiate request-consistent target graphs (Middle). These graph transformations are then realized through the detach-and-rejoin mechanism (Right), allowing the fleet to split into request-serving subgraphs and later rejoin the exploration backbone. It is worth noting that both intra-team and inter-team information exchange are latency-bounded.

BibTeX

@misc{tian2025morocomultioperatorrobotcoordinationinteraction,
      title={MoRoCo: An Online Topology-Adaptive Framework for Multi-Operator Multi-Robot Coordination under Restricted Communication}, 
      author={Zhuoli Tian and Yanze Bao and Yuyang Zhang and Meng Guo},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2508.07657},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.RO},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07657}, 
      }