In complex multi-robot application scenarios, particularly in dynamically adversarial, hazardous, or disaster environments, traditional cooperation paradigms face significant challenges due to unreliable or absent communication links. Achieving efficient cooperation in the absence of communication has become a key bottleneck limiting the performance of multirobot systems. In this paper, we propose a Global Intent Prediction and Decomposition (GIPD) framework that enables robots to perform cooperative behavior without relying on communication. Each robot independently infers a globally consistent intent based solely on its local observations, ensuring implicit alignment across the system. Given the inferred global intent, robots autonomously determine their responsibilities and select the most appropriate tasks. They then base their local decision-making on the global intent, selected tasks, and individual observations, thereby facilitating effective execution and cooperation. We validate our approach using the MPE and SMAC benchmarks. Additionally, real-world experiments involving multiple ships demonstrate the effectiveness and practical applicability of the proposed GIPD method.

Human drivers are remarkably robust against various unexpected occurring variations and corruptions by understanding temporal changes and traffic scenes. In contrast, the neural network based autonomous navigation system can be easily affected by sensor data anomaly, like occlusion, sensor noise, challenging weather and illumination conditions. Such external disturbances are inevitable in practical driving applications. In this paper, we develop a semi-supervised anomaly detection module to detect the corrupted data while extracting the traffic scenario features. We further introduce an end-to-end robust autonomous navigation framework based on the idea that the consecutive frames of clean data depict a similar traffic scenario and the differences among the sequential data imply the dynamic state changes. By taking into consideration both spatial traffic scenario and temporal environmental variation, the model is able to achieve robust navigation against sensor data corruptions. We conduct experiments in CARLA platform and the evaluation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Robustness and safety concerns of perception systems are of great importance for autonomous vehicle navigation applications. Recent researches demonstrate that the surrounding dynamic object detection results of current perception systems can be easily interfered or attacked to mislead the navigation performance of the victim vehicle. In this paper, we develop a GNN based relation learning network to detect the abnormal information in the vehicle perception results, by investigating the relations among the surrounding dynamic objects and also the overall scenario information. Our underlying logic is that the motion of each surrounding object is also affected by its neighbors as well as the whole traffic scenario information, so there should exist a certain amount of consistency among those agents. Learning their spatiotemporal relations provides critical information for detecting the abnormal perception information. Experimental results on the standard CARLA simulator demonstrate our effectiveness in various scenarios and scalability to unseen cases.

This article investigates the multirobot cooperative navigation problem based on raw visual observations. A fully end-to-end learning framework is presented, which leverages graph neural networks to learn local motion coordination and utilizes deep reinforcement learning to generate visuomotor policy that enables each robot to move to its goal without the need of environment map and global positioning information. Experimental results show that, with a few tens of robots, our approach achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art imitation learning-based approaches with bird-view state inputs. We also illustrate our generalizability to crowded and large environments and our scalability to ten times number of the training robots. In addition, we demonstrate that our model trained for multirobot case can also improve the success rate in the single-robot navigation task in unseen environments. Note to Practitioners—With the development of intelligent industrial and logistic systems, robotic transportation systems are widely implemented. However, existing multirobot path coordination and navigation approaches are basically under some unreasonable assumptions, which are very hard to be implemented in practical scenarios. This article aims to greatly promote the real application of learning-based multirobot cooperative navigation approach, in order to achieve the following. First, we introduce an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework instead of the commonly used imitation learning strategy, as the latter one needs exhaustive training data to cover all the scenarios and does not have the required generalizability. Second, we directly use the raw sensor data instead of the commonly used bird-eye-view semantic observations, as the latter one is generally not representative of practical application scenario from the robot perspective and cannot solve the occlusion issue. Third, we interpret our learned model to illustrate which parts of the input and shared observations contribute most to the robots’ final actions. The above interpretability ensures predictability (thus safety) of our visuomotor policy in practical applications. Our learned visuomotor policy has the ability to coordinate dozens of robots by only using raw visual observations in unknown environments without map nor global localization information, this is the first time in the literature. Our future work includes solving the sim-to-real issue and conducting physical experiments.