HECTOR: Human-centric Hierarchical Coordination and Supervision of Robotic Fleets under Continual Temporal Tasks

arXiv cs.RO / 4/14/2026

💬 OpinionIdeas & Deep AnalysisModels & Research

共有:

Key Points

The paper introduces HECTOR, a human-centric hierarchical coordination and supervision framework for large robotic fleets operating under continual, uncertain temporal tasks.
HECTOR combines three layers: an online multimodal bidirectional human–fleet interaction protocol, rolling assignment of tasks to teams over a planning horizon, and real-time intra-team coordination based on detected subtasks during execution.
It allows mission specifications to be expressed as temporal logic formulas over collaborative actions, aiming to support operator actions like adding/canceling tasks and changing priorities while the system replans efficiently.
The approach is evaluated via extensive human-in-the-loop simulations on heterogeneous fleets under environmental uncertainty, showing the benefit of multi-granularity human control for both efficiency and reduced operator burden.

Abstract

Robotic fleets can be extremely efficient when working concurrently and collaboratively, e.g., for delivery, surveillance, search and rescue. However, it can be demanding or even impractical for an operator to directly control each robot. Thus, autonomy of the fleet and its online interaction with the operator are both essential, particularly in dynamic and partially unknown environments. The operator might need to add new tasks, cancel some tasks, change priorities and modify planning results. How to design the procedure for these interactions and efficient algorithms to fulfill these needs have been mostly neglected in the related literature. Thus, this work proposes a human-centric coordination and supervision scheme (HECTOR) for large-scale robotic fleets under continual and uncertain temporal tasks. It consists of three hierarchical layers: (I) the bidirectional and multimodal protocol of online human-fleet interaction, where the operator interacts with and supervises the whole fleet; (II) the rolling assignment of currently-known tasks to teams within a certain horizon, and (III) the dynamic coordination within a team given the detected subtasks during online execution. The overall mission can be as general as temporal logic formulas over collaborative actions. Such hierarchical structure allows human interaction and supervision at different granularities and triggering conditions, to both improve computational efficiency and reduce human effort. Extensive human-in-the-loop simulations are performed over heterogeneous fleets under various temporal tasks and environmental uncertainties.