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Pairwise Scoring Picked the Wrong Robot Plan on Six of Seven Maps

Dropping three- and four-robot interactions produced regret as high as 0.337 of map coverage.

Published Updated Story ID: mp-2026-09-25-011
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Summary

Dropping three- and four-robot interactions produced regret as high as 0.337 of map coverage.

Researchers replayed all 16 subsets of each four-robot exploration plan to calculate exact delivered coverage, then compared that ranking with scores built only from singleton and pair terms. At the 15-meter candidate range, the order-two approximation changed the selected plan on six of seven maps in each of two plan families, with regret up to 0.337 of total map coverage. A least-squares pairwise fit improved the result but still changed the winner on three of seven maps per family.

Why it matters

Dropping three- and four-robot interactions produced regret as high as 0.337 of map coverage.

Limits and context

  • Researchers replayed all 16 subsets of each four-robot exploration plan to calculate exact delivered coverage, then compared that ranking with scores built only from singleton and pair terms.

Key claims

  1. Dropping three- and four-robot interactions produced regret as high as 0.337 of map coverage.

    Qualification: Researchers replayed all 16 subsets of each four-robot exploration plan to calculate exact delivered coverage, then compared that ranking with scores built only from singleton and pair terms.

    Evidence: source-2026-09-25-011

Sources

  1. arXiv preprint 2609.29929arXiv · primary research

Corrections

No corrections have been recorded for this story.