Learning Coordinated Visuomotor Box-Pushing from Solo Demonstrations

Abstract

Multi-robot imitation learning, particularly in settings where visuomotor policies are deployed in a communication-free, onboard decentralised style, represents an attractive paradigm. However, its realisation remains insufficiently understood, largely due to the difficulty of collecting collective demonstrations, since a single operator cannot control many robots simultaneously. Meanwhile, unlike coupled collaborative manipulation, many coordinated tasks achieve system-wide efficiency primarily through minimising inter-robot interference. This structure motivates us to study whether data collected by a teleoperated single-robot can be leveraged for large-scale coordinated box-pushing as a testbed. We systematically investigate dataset creation strategies and lightweight policy architectures. In particular, experiments with up to 40 robots highlight the difficulty of acquiring effective coordination solely through passive observation of other operating robots, revealing a concrete bottleneck for multi-robot research.