Heterogeneity in Multi-Robot Environmental Monitoring for Resolving Time-Conflicting Tasks

Multi-robot systems performing continuous tasks face a performance trade-off when interrupted by urgent, time-critical sub-tasks. We investigate this trade-off in a scenario where a team must balance area patrolling with locating an anomalous radio signal. To address this trade-off, we evaluate both behavioral heterogeneity through agent role specialization ("patrollers" and "searchers") and sensing heterogeneity (i.e., only the searchers can sense the radio signal). Through simulation, we identify the Pareto-optimal trade-offs under varying team compositions, with behaviorally heterogeneous teams demonstrating the most balanced trade-offs in the majority of cases. When sensing capability is restricted, heterogeneous teams with half of the sensing-capable agents perform comparably to homogeneous teams, providing cost-saving rationale for restricting sensor payload deployment. Our findings demonstrate that pre-deployment role and sensing specialization are powerful design considerations for multi-robot systems facing time-conflicting tasks, where varying the degree of behavioral heterogeneity can tune system performance toward either task.