DC-Ada: Reward-Only Decentralized Sensor Adaptation for Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Teams

TL;DR

DC-Ada is a gradient-free, communication-efficient decentralized method that adapts sensor observations in heterogeneous multi-robot teams to maintain task performance without retraining policies.

Contribution

It introduces DC-Ada, a novel reward-only adaptation approach that maps heterogeneous sensors into a fixed inference interface without policy fine-tuning.

Findings

DC-Ada improves task completion in severe coverage-based mapping scenarios.

Heterogeneity significantly degrades performance of frozen shared policies.

Observation normalization and DC-Ada offer complementary robustness improvements.

Abstract

Heterogeneity is a defining feature of deployed multi-robot teams: platforms often differ in sensing modalities, ranges, fields of view, and failure patterns. Controllers trained under nominal sensing can degrade sharply when deployed on robots with missing or mismatched sensors, even when the task and action interface are unchanged. We present DC-Ada, a reward-only decentralized adaptation method that keeps a pretrained shared policy frozen and instead adapts compact per-robot observation transforms to map heterogeneous sensing into a fixed inference interface. DC-Ada is gradient-free and communication-minimal: it uses budgeted accept/reject random search with short common-random-number rollouts under a strict step budget. We evaluate DC-Ada against four baselines in a deterministic 2D multi-robot simulator covering warehouse logistics, search and rescue, and collaborative mapping, across four heterogeneity regimes (H0--H3) and five seeds with a matched budget of $200{,}000$ joint environment steps per run. Results show that heterogeneity can substantially degrade a frozen shared policy and that no single mitigation dominates across all tasks and metrics. Observation normalization is strongest for reward robustness in warehouse logistics and competitive in search and rescue, while the frozen shared policy is strongest for reward in collaborative mapping. DC-Ada offers a useful complementary operating point: it improves completion most clearly in severe coverage-based mapping while requiring only scalar team returns and no policy fine-tuning or persistent communication. These results position DC-Ada as a practical deploy-time adaptation method for heterogeneous teams.