MoRoCo: Topology-Adaptive Human-Fleet Coordination under Restricted Communication

Zhuoli Tian, Yanze Bao, Yuyang Zhang, Meng Guo

Keywords: Planetary exploration; Communication-constrained exploration; Human-robot collaboration; Multi-robot coordination; Intermittent connectivity

TL;DR: MoRoCo supports exploration and tasks with diverse communication demands via adaptive topology reconfiguration.

Abstract: Autonomous robot teams are increasingly deployed with human operators in communication-restricted environments for exploration and intervention tasks such as search and rescue, inspection, and reconnaissance. In these settings, short-range and unreliable links make it difficult to sustain collaborative exploration and support timely operator interaction, including status updates, video access, and teleoperation. We present MoRoCo, a topology-adaptive framework for human-multi-robot coordination under restricted communication. MoRoCo builds on a latency-bounded intermittent communication backbone that guarantees timely delivery of robot-collected information to operators, while allowing the team to reconfigure online through a detach-and-rejoin mechanism. On top of this backbone, the framework instantiates request-consistent communication topologies to support different interaction modes, including sustained operator-to-robot access and inter-team information exchange. This design enables online request handling without abandoning exploration. We validate MoRoCo in human-in-the-loop simulations and hardware experiments, showing reliable coordination, timely operator updates, and effective topology adaptation for communication-demanding tasks in unknown environments.

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Submission Number: 1