Higher Order Reasoning for Collaborative Communicationless Mobile Robot Operations

2026-05-20

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of coordination in multi-robot systems operating under communication constraints and partial observability, where the absence of information exchange hinders effective collaboration. The authors propose a dynamic cognitive planning framework that, for the first time, integrates higher-order belief particles with epistemic logic, enabling robots to maintain and update beliefs about the environment and teammates’ intentions through Bayesian inference. Decision-making is realized via behavior trees, while trajectory planning leverages a time-aware MPPI controller. This approach facilitates implicit coordination and long-horizon planning without explicit communication. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate significant improvements over first-order baselines, with markedly reduced task completion times, thereby validating the method’s effectiveness and robustness in communication-limited scenarios.

Abstract

In communicationless environments, multi-robot systems must operate without the constant information exchange that many coordination strategies typically assume. This paper presents a novel dynamic epistemic planning framework that enables implicit coordination and long horizon planning through higher-order reasoning among robots. With our approach, robots form and propagate higher-order belief particles, update world beliefs using Bayesian inference, and select actions via a behavior tree that anticipates teammates' likely decisions. A temporally aware Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) controller integrates this reasoning into low-level execution, allowing robots to plan intercepts and adapt trajectories under partial observability. The proposed framework is evaluated in both simulations and physical experiments, where it consistently reduces task completion time compared to a first-order baseline, demonstrating that epistemic logic can serve as a robust foundation for resilient coordination in communication-restricted domains.

Problem

• communicationless
• multi-robot systems
• coordination
• higher-order reasoning
• implicit coordination

Innovation

• higher-order reasoning
• dynamic epistemic planning
• communicationless coordination
• belief propagation
• Model Predictive Path Integral