Mobility-Budget-Constrained Submodular Maximization for Distributed Semantic Multi-Robot Exploration

Abstract:Multi-robot exploration under communication and mobility constraints requires balancing information gain with reachability. We present a distributed semantic exploration framework that combines Dirichlet mapping, budget-constrained trajectory selection, and Resource-Aware distributed Greedy (RAG) coordination. Each robot clusters frontiers, computes terrain- and heading-aware least-cost paths with a single budget-limited Dijkstra search, and selects feasible paths by marginal information gain, represented by the expected reduction in Dirichlet entropy. Each robot's per-round selection is exact, the team's joint per-round information gain is at least half the centralized optimum, and the bound degrades gracefully under limited communication. Ten-run gridworld ablations show improved coverage, semantic mIoU, and map certainty with lower entropy and traversal cost per unit distance than shortest-distance frontier selection. Budget-sensitivity experiments show that an intermediate budget best balances path reach and receding-horizon execution. In photorealistic full-system simulation against five coordination rules run in their native published forms, the proposed method attains the highest mean coverage and semantic accuracy while being the only one that respects the per-trajectory mobility budget.

5 pages, 3 figures. Accepted to the IROS 2026 SeMaNa Workshop. The first two authors contributed equally

Robotics (cs.RO); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA)

arXiv:2610.17562 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.17562v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.17562 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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