MeCo: Enhancing LLM-Empowered Multi-Robot Collaboration via Similar Task Memoization

Abstract: Multi-robot systems have been widely deployed in real-world applications, providing significant improvements in efficiency and reductions in labor costs. However, most existing multi-robot collaboration methods rely on extensive task-specific training, which limits their adaptability to new or diverse scenarios. Recent research leverages the language understanding and reasoning capabilities of LLMs to enable more flexible collaboration without specialized training. Yet, current LLM-empowered approaches remain inefficient: when confronted with identical or similar tasks, they must replan from scratch because they omit task-level similarities. To address this limitation, we propose MeCo, a similarity-aware multi-robot collaboration framework that applies the principle of ``cache and reuse'' (a.k.a., memoization) to reduce redundant computation. Unlike simple task repetition, identifying and reusing solutions for similar but not identical tasks is far more challenging, particularly in multi-robot settings. To this end, MeCo introduces a new similarity testing method that retrieves previously solved tasks with high relevance, enabling effective plan reuse without re-invoking LLMs. Furthermore, we present MeCoBench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate performance on similar-task collaboration scenarios. Experimental results show that MeCo substantially reduces planning costs and improves success rates compared with state-of-the-art approaches.