{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/multi-robot-coverage-and-exploration-using","title":"Multi-Robot Coverage and Exploration using Spatial Graph Neural Networks","arxiv_id":"2011.01119","date":"2020-11-02","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ekaterina Tolstaya","James Paulos","Vijay Kumar","Alejandro Ribeiro"],"abstract":"The multi-robot coverage problem is an essential building block for systems that perform tasks like inspection or search and rescue. We discretize the coverage problem to induce a spatial graph of locations and represent robots as nodes in the graph. Then, we train a Graph Neural Network controller that leverages the spatial equivariance of the task to imitate an expert open-loop routing solution. This approach generalizes well to much larger maps and larger teams that are intractable for the expert. In particular, the model generalizes effectively to a simulation of ten quadrotors and dozens of buildings. We also demonstrate the GNN controller can surpass planning-based approaches in an exploration task.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.01119v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.01119v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"multi-robot-coverage-and-exploration-using","repo_url":"https://github.com/katetolstaya/graph_rl","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"multi-robot-coverage-and-exploration-using","repo_url":"https://github.com/katetolstaya/gym-flock","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}