RoboTalk: Learning Multi-Robot Communication and Coordination from Multimodal Demonstrations

Abstract:Multi-robot collaboration could enable more efficient and scalable solutions to complex robotic tasks, but collaboration under partial observability remains challenging. Natural-language communication offers a promising approach to coordinating robots under partial observability. However, in decentralized manipulation, jointly learning explicit inter-robot communication and skill-level action selection from multimodal demonstrations remains underexplored for small vision-language models (VLMs) intended for on-device deployment. To address this gap, we introduce RoboTalk, a synthetic data-generation pipeline and dataset of 7,950 multimodal trajectories spanning 53 mobile-manipulation kitchen tasks for training small VLMs to communicate and coordinate. The dataset includes a leader-follower planning protocol, tool calls (perception, manipulation, navigation, and communication), rationale traces, and diversified natural-language communication. Fine-tuning open-source models on our dataset can reach 77% success on novel held-out tasks, a significant improvement over the untuned open source models, which had a success rate of around ~2%.

Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.23997 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.23997v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.23997 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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