SenseSwarm: Swarm Exploration via Neural Structure Estimation with Shared World-Anticipation for Rapid Mapping

arXiv:2610.22905v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A robot swarm covers a building faster with more robots, but the map is only as complete as the space the robots have physically visited. We target the amount of an unknown building a decentralized swarm knows at each instant, ahead of physical coverage. SenseSwarm serves a lightweight learned map predictor on the swarm's shared occupancy map and folds the predicted structure back into a stigmergic guidance field. Its 709K-parameter predictor is fine-tuned on the swarm's own multi-front observations, which we show is necessary: a single-robot predictor collapses on such views. We build a benchmark of twelve real building floors from HouseExpo, HKUST, and KTH, up to 24,000 square meters, and run 1,620 simulations across nine coordination methods, swarm sizes 32 to 512, and three seeds. On physical coverage the swarm is near parity with a greedy frontier planner, as expected. On map reconstruction, every non-predictive baseline needs 1.3 to 1.9 times longer to reach an 80 percent known map, and SenseSwarm holds an equal-time area lead of about 670 square meters, up to 1,359. Folding the prediction into the shared field matters: the same predictor applied per robot matches our speed but suffers a 6.9 times higher inter-robot contact rate at 512 robots. The prediction is computed once per shared map, so its cost stayed flat from 32 to 512 robots.