Structured interactions improve distributed coordination beyond model scaling in a real-world multi-robot system

arXiv:2605.30383v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scaling individual robot capabilities is common but costly. Here we investigate a system-level design question in real-world multi-robot coordination: given matched hardware budgets, does restructuring communication among robots yield larger gains than increasing onboard model size? Using a representative transport-and-mapping task with 10 physical robots (5 runs per condition, 60 runs total), we find that switching from fully connected to modula