VORL-EXPLORE: A Hybrid Learning Planning Approach to Multi-Robot Exploration in Dynamic Environments

TL;DR

VORL-EXPLORE introduces a hybrid learning and planning framework for multi-robot exploration that improves efficiency and safety in dynamic environments by coupling task allocation with local navigability estimation.

Contribution

It presents a novel fidelity-coupled approach integrating learning and planning, enabling adaptive, risk-aware exploration without manual risk tuning.

Findings

High success rates in complex scenarios

Shorter path lengths and reduced overlap

Robust collision avoidance

Abstract

Hierarchical multi-robot exploration commonly decouples frontier allocation from local navigation, which can make the system brittle in dense and dynamic environments. Because the allocator lacks direct awareness of execution difficulty, robots may cluster at bottlenecks, trigger oscillatory replanning, and generate redundant coverage. We propose VORL-EXPLORE, a hybrid learning and planning framework that addresses this limitation through execution fidelity, a shared estimate of local navigability that couples task allocation with motion execution. This fidelity signal is incorporated into a fidelity-coupled Voronoi objective with inter-robot repulsion to reduce contention before it emerges. It also drives a risk-aware adaptive arbitration mechanism between global A* guidance and a reactive reinforcement learning policy, balancing long-range efficiency with safe interaction in confined spaces. The framework further supports online self-supervised recalibration of the fidelity model using pseudo-labels derived from recent progress and safety outcomes, enabling adaptation to non-stationary obstacles without manual risk tuning. We evaluate this capability separately in a dedicated severe-traffic ablation. Extensive experiments in randomized grids and a Gazebo factory scenario show high success rates, shorter path length, lower overlap, and robust collision avoidance. The source code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.