DM³-Nav: Fully decentralized multi-agent system for semantic navigation without central coordinator

Researchers present DM³-Nav, a decentralized multi-agent semantic navigation system supporting multimodal open-vocabulary goal specification and multi-object missions, with operation relying on ad-hoc pairwise communication between robots exchanging local maps, goal status, and navigation intent without synchronization.

The system eliminates single points of failure by removing the need for a central coordinator, global map aggregation, or shared global state at runtime; an implicit task allocation mechanism combines intent broadcasting and distance-weighted frontier selection to reduce redundant exploration.

Evaluations on HM3DSem scenes using the HM3Dv0.2 and GOAT-Bench datasets show DM³-Nav matches or exceeds centralized and shared-map baselines; validation in a real-world office environment using two mobile robots demonstrated successful deployment relying entirely on onboard sensing and computation.