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arXiv · 2605.21723

Learning Altruistic Collaboration in Heterogeneous Multi-Team Systems

Riwa Karam·Ruoyu Lin·Brooks A. Butler·Magnus Egerstedt
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Abstract

This paper studies heterogeneous multi-team collaboration through dynamic robot allocation, where robots are treated as transferable resources. Leveraging Hamilton's rule from ecology as an altruistic decision-making mechanism, we propose a multi-team collaborative resource allocation framework with heterogeneous capabilities, transfer costs, and capability-dependent contributions. The resulting allocation problem is combinatorial and is shown to be NP-hard. To address scalability, we develop a graph neural network policy under centralized training and decentralized execution that approximates the altruistic allocations based on Hamilton's rule. The model operates over the team interaction graph and predicts robot-level transfer decisions and next robot-to-team assignments. The proposed approach is validated in a firefighting scenario through simulations and experiments, demonstrating that the learned policy achieves near-optimal performance while scaling to larger systems.

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BibTeXRIS

Riwa Karam, Ruoyu Lin, Brooks A. Butler, Magnus Egerstedt. 2026-05-20. Learning Altruistic Collaboration in Heterogeneous Multi-Team Systems. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21723

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