Paper Detail

DuoMind: Enabling Distributed Multi-Robot Coordination with Semantic Communication

Hanchu Zhou, Dechen Gao, Hang Wang, Brendan Lynch, Boqi Zhao, Qiyao Ma, Raman Goyal, Junshan Zhang

arxiv Score 18.6

Published 2026-10-01 · First seen 2026-10-02

General AI

Abstract

Vision-language models (VLMs) and vision-language-action models (VLAs) have recently driven rapid progress in general-purpose robots, yet most progress has focused on single-robot settings. Extending these capabilities to multi-robot systems remains challenging because robots must coordinate long-horizon behaviors while maintaining reliable, fine-grained execution. We introduce DuoMind, a distributed hierarchical framework for multi-robot coordination through semantic communication. Each robot uses a VLA-based action model for low-level execution and a VLM-based orchestrator for high-level reasoning and inter-agent coordination. At each planning step, the orchestrator at each robot reasons over the task instruction, local observations, and messages received from other robots. It then generates low-level instructions for the action model and semantic messages for peer robots. This architecture exploits the complementary strengths of pretrained models by combining the semantic reasoning capabilities of VLMs with the precise action-generation capabilities of VLAs. To address the scarcity of benchmarks for multi-robot coordination, we further develop RoboPoly, a benchmark comprising long-horizon manipulation tasks that require coordinated, closed-loop execution under distributed control. Experiments on RoboPoly and RoboTwin demonstrate that DuoMind improves multi-robot task performance, while ablation studies confirm the contributions of hierarchical orchestration and semantic communication. More details are available on our project page.

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BibTeX

@article{zhou2026duomind,
  title = {DuoMind: Enabling Distributed Multi-Robot Coordination with Semantic Communication},
  author = {Hanchu Zhou and Dechen Gao and Hang Wang and Brendan Lynch and Boqi Zhao and Qiyao Ma and Raman Goyal and Junshan Zhang},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Vision-language models (VLMs) and vision-language-action models (VLAs) have recently driven rapid progress in general-purpose robots, yet most progress has focused on single-robot settings. Extending these capabilities to multi-robot systems remains challenging because robots must coordinate long-horizon behaviors while maintaining reliable, fine-grained execution. We introduce DuoMind, a distributed hierarchical framework for multi-robot coordination through semantic communication. Each robot u},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02161},
  keywords = {cs.RO, cs.AI},
  eprint = {2610.02161},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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