Dynamic Coalition Formation and Routing for Multirobot Task Allocation via Reinforcement Learning

Many multi-robot deployments, such as automated construction of buildings, distributed search, or cooperative mapping, often require agents to intelligently coordinate their trajectories and form coalition over a large domain, to complete spatially distributed tasks as quickly as possible. We focus on scenarios involving homogeneous robots, but where tasks vary in the number of agents required to start them. For example, construction robots may need to collaboratively air-lift heavy objects at different locations (e.g., prefabricated rooms, crates of material/equipment), where the weight of each payload defines the required coalition size. To balance the total travel time of the agents and their waiting time (before task initiation), agents need to carefully sequence tasks but also dynamically form/disband coalitions. While simpler problems can be approached using heuristics or optimization, these methods struggle with more complex instances involving large task-to-agent ratios, where frequent coalition changes are needed. In this work, we propose to let agents learn to iteratively build cooperative schedules to solve such problems, by casting the problem in the reinforcement learning framework. Our approach relies on an attention-based neural network, allowing agents to reason about the current state of the system to sequence movement decisions that optimize short-term coalition formation and long-term task scheduling. We further propose a novel leader-follower technique to boost cooperation learning and compare our performance to conventional baselines in a wide variety of scenarios. There, our method closely matches or outperforms the baselines; in particular, it yields higher-quality solutions and is at least 2 orders of magnitude faster than exact solver in cases where frequent coalition updates are required.