MA-LIPP: Cooperative Multi-Agent Load-Aware Informative Path Planning for Heterogeneous Robot Teams

Abstract:Field robotics missions often require physical samples to be returned to laboratories for analysis, making path planning inherently load-aware and order-dependent as accumulated samples increase payload and traversal energy costs. In single-robot Load-Aware Informative Path Planning (LIPP), this rigidly couples sensing with hauling: a solitary robot must transport every collected sample, forcing frequent depot returns that severely restrict its spatial coverage. Heterogeneous multi-robot teams can overcome this bottleneck by dividing labor---enabling high-precision samplers to collect while high-capacity carriers handle transport. However, this introduces a complex coordination challenge regarding when, where, what, and to whom handoffs should occur on top of the LIPP problem. To address this tightly coupled problem, we introduce Multi-Agent LIPP (MA-LIPP), which enables teams to cooperate through asynchronous "dead drops," allowing one robot to deposit samples for another to retrieve later without requiring synchronous rendezvous. We formulate MA-LIPP as an exact Mixed-Integer Quadratic Program (MIQP) alongside a scalable Pairwise Large-Neighborhood Search (LNS) heuristic for complex real-world applications. The heuristic matches exact optima in $95.5\%$ of certified cases and reduces weighted posterior variance by $16.1$--$19.8\%$ relative to a sequential baseline on larger instances of up to 12 robots, providing a robust framework for cooperative physical-sampling missions.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.21167 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.21167v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.21167 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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