Distributed Agent System: Fault-Tolerant Collaboration Among Embodied Agents

2026-07-12

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenges of cumulative error and reliability faced by embodied agents performing long-horizon tasks under resource constraints and environmental uncertainty. The authors propose a distributed fault-tolerant architecture leveraging edge–cloud collaboration, redefining reliability as system-level fault tolerance. Their approach features a two-tiered fault-tolerance mechanism: within individual agents, fault-tolerant alignment mitigates error propagation, while across heterogeneous agents, a semi-formal language protocol enables robust coordination. In contrast to conventional single-round, zero-error optimization paradigms, this framework substantially enhances the robustness of long-term task execution and offers a scalable engineering pathway for reliable collaboration among heterogeneous embodied agents in industrial settings.

Abstract

AI engineering is shifting from passive text generation by large language models (LLMs) to agent-driven task execution, creating new reliability challenges for long-horizon tasks under resource constraints and environmental uncertainty. Conventional error-elimination optimization strategies fail to address cumulative error propagation. This paper proposes Distributed Agent System (DAS), a device-edge-cloud framework for fault-tolerant collaboration among heterogeneous agents. We redefine agent reliability as system-level fault tolerance rather than single-turn zero-error accuracy, and present a two-layer fault-tolerance architecture: single-agent execution reliability via fault-tolerant alignment, and cross-agent communication reliability via semi-formal language protocols. This framework provides a practical engineering pathway for reliable heterogeneous embodied agents collaboration in industrial scenarios.

Problem

• fault tolerance
• embodied agents
• error propagation
• long-horizon tasks
• heterogeneous collaboration

Innovation

• Distributed Agent System
• fault-tolerant collaboration
• embodied agents
• semi-formal language protocols
• heterogeneous agents