HEROIC: Heterogeneous Evidential Reasoning for Open-Vocabulary Identification and Cross-Robot Collaboration

📄 arXiv: 2609.19803v1 📥 PDF

作者: Mihir Chauhan, Aarav Jain, Addison Zucek, Manmeet Dang, Damon Conover, Aniket Bera

分类: cs.RO

发布日期: 2026-09-17


💡 一句话要点

提出HEROIC框架以解决多机器人协作中的开放词汇识别问题

🎯 匹配领域: 支柱三:空间感知与语义 (Perception & Semantics)

关键词: 多机器人协作 开放词汇识别 自然语言处理 异构系统 搜索与救援 动态任务调整 证据推理

📋 核心要点

  1. 现有多机器人协作方法角色固定,无法根据任务动态调整,导致资源利用不充分。
  2. HEROIC框架通过自然语言通信实现去中心化的角色分配和任务调整,提升搜索效率。
  3. 实验表明,HEROIC在目标识别成功率上达到84%,显著优于传统方法的35-54%。

📝 摘要(中文)

多智能体异构空地机器人团队在开放世界搜索中具有吸引力,适用于侦察、城市搜索与救援、灾后响应等任务。现有方法中,机器人角色固定或依赖手写标签,无法动态调整任务。本文提出HEROIC,一个去中心化的异构多智能体开放词汇搜索协调框架,要求智能体仅通过自然语言进行通信。HEROIC根据传感器属性和规模法则进行初始角色分配,并在任务提示下调整飞行高度和搜索间距。实验结果表明,HEROIC在六个场景中以84%的成功率到达目标,显著优于现有视觉语言基线的35-54%。

🔬 方法详解

问题定义:本文旨在解决多机器人团队在开放环境中进行搜索时,角色固定导致的任务适应性不足问题。现有方法无法根据任务动态调整机器人角色,影响搜索效率。

核心思路:HEROIC框架通过自然语言指令实现去中心化的角色分配,结合传感器属性和规模法则动态调整机器人任务,确保在不同环境下的高效搜索。

技术框架:HEROIC的整体架构包括初始角色分配、任务调整、证据信念维护和近距离验证四个主要模块。初始角色分配基于传感器数据,任务调整则依赖于自然语言提示。

关键创新:HEROIC的核心创新在于其去中心化的角色分配机制和基于自然语言的动态任务调整能力,显著提高了多机器人团队在复杂环境中的适应性和效率。

关键设计:在设计中,HEROIC使用传感器属性和规模法则来确定飞行高度和搜索间距,确保安全飞行并优化搜索路径。

🖼️ 关键图片

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📊 实验亮点

在全栈实验中,HEROIC在六个场景中以84%的成功率到达目标,相较于传统视觉语言基线的35-54%有显著提升,同时在时间上也提前了2-4倍,展示了其在多机器人协作中的优越性能。

🎯 应用场景

HEROIC框架在城市搜索与救援、灾后响应和危险环境探索等领域具有广泛的应用潜力。通过提高多机器人团队的协作效率,能够更快速地完成复杂任务,提升救援和响应能力,具有重要的实际价值和社会影响。

📄 摘要(原文)

Multi-agent heterogeneous air-ground robot teams are attractive for open world search, with applications for reconnaissance, urban search and rescue missions (USAR), disaster response and recovery, and hazardous environments. These two platforms have different failure modes: aerial robots cover ground quickly but cannot resolve small or occluded targets from altitude, while ground robots can identify objects-of-interest, such as people or hazardous objects, at close range but cover less area. Existing language-tasked teams either have roles fixed prior, or have a language model assign them from hand-written capability tags, so the team is unable to know when within a mission an asset is no longer useful. We present HEROIC, a decentralized heterogeneous multi-agent open-vocabulary search coordination framework that requires agents to communicate in natural language only. HEROIC's initial agent role assignment is derived from sensor properties and a scale law to determine whether targets can be detected with a high confidence. From the mission's natural language prompt alone, this law assigns aerial flight altitudes and sweep spacing. When this calculated height falls below the altitude for safe flight, aerial agents re-task themselves from searcher to aerial triage, escort, and route guide for ground agents. Both robots maintain an evidential belief over the search area (bearing rays for positive evidence, a log-odds posterior for negative evidence) and gate any arrival on close-range verification. In full-stack experiments, HEROIC reaches the target 84% of the time across all 6 scenes, compares to 35-54% for vision-language frontier baselines, frontier-based search, lawnmower, and random-walk running the same perception, all while being 2-4x sooner to arrive at the target.