Tunable Spatial Task Allocation with Application to Maritime Swarms
Abstract
In this chapter, we explore how a team of autonomous agents can flexibly reconfigure the distribution of its members across many spatially embedded tasks using a task allocation strategy grounded in a generalization of the recently proposed Nonlinear Opinion Dynamics model. Motivated by an adaptive maritime survey application, we couple opinion dynamics directly to spatial movement and examine how the emergent macroscopic allocation is shaped by the interplay between environmental geometry, nature of social interactions, and task demands. We illustrate in simulation how social coupling in the model tunes group cohesion, producing macroscopic allocation patterns ranging from maximally dispersed states, to intermediate semi-dispersed states with a smaller number of distinct subgroups, to maximally cohesive consensus states, in distinct and interpretable parameter regimes. Furthermore, we demonstrate with illustrative examples how a team can reconfigure itself in real time under changing task demands. For allocation scenarios with distance-based task preference and matched number of agents and tasks, we relate numerically the final allocation in the group to the Hungarian optimum, illustrating close-to-optimal performance. We illustrate performance of this method under realistic communication constraints in the MOOS-IvP-Multi simulation environment with simulated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Together, these examples show how a common set of local interaction rules can support a large range of interpretable macroscopic allocation states and flexible transitions between them.
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BibTeX
@misc{thota2026tunable,
title = {{Tunable Spatial Task Allocation with Application to Maritime Swarms}},
author = {Vishnudatta Thota and Tyler Paine and Anastasia Bizyaeva},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.39018},
eprint = {2610.39018},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39018},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Tunable Spatial Task Allocation with Application to Maritime Swarms
AU - Vishnudatta Thota
AU - Tyler Paine
AU - Anastasia Bizyaeva
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/28
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.39018
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39018
AB - In this chapter, we explore how a team of autonomous agents can flexibly reconfigure the distribution of its members across many spatially embedded tasks using a task allocation strategy grounded in a generalization of the recently proposed Nonlinear Opinion Dynamics model. Motivated by an adaptive maritime survey application, we couple opinion dynamics directly to spatial movement and examine how the emergent macroscopic allocation is shaped by the interplay between environmental geometry, nature of social interactions, and task demands. We illustrate in simulation how social coupling in the model tunes group cohesion, producing macroscopic allocation patterns ranging from maximally dispersed states, to intermediate semi-dispersed states with a smaller number of distinct subgroups, to maximally cohesive consensus states, in distinct and interpretable parameter regimes. Furthermore, we demonstrate with illustrative examples how a team can reconfigure itself in real time under changing task demands. For allocation scenarios with distance-based task preference and matched number of agents and tasks, we relate numerically the final allocation in the group to the Hungarian optimum, illustrating close-to-optimal performance. We illustrate performance of this method under realistic communication constraints in the MOOS-IvP-Multi simulation environment with simulated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Together, these examples show how a common set of local interaction rules can support a large range of interpretable macroscopic allocation states and flexible transitions between them.
ER -