Semantic Map Sharing and Capability-Aware Coverage Planning for AI-Native 6G Robotic Coordination
Abdulqader Dhafer, Qi Wang, Zhou Daniel Hao
Abstract
Search and Rescue (SAR) operations increasingly deploy heterogeneous teams of aerial and ground robots. However, conventional coverage methods typically do not translate perceived terrain into platform-specific reachability, while continuous image exchange imposes a high communication cost. We propose an edge-centric, semantic-aware coverage planning framework that integrates aerial terrain perception, robot-specific traversability reasoning, and payload-efficient semantic state sharing. Aerial observations are converted into compact semantic grid maps, enabling reachability-constrained area decomposition and capability-aware coverage paths that assign only regions admitted by each robot's capability profile. The resulting perception-sharing-planning loop feeds semantic corrections into traversability reasoning and replanning, forming an application-level mechanism motivated by AI-enabled goal-oriented communication envisioned for AI-native 6G networks. For the high-update case, transmitting semantic corrections reduces the application payload by a factor of approximately $82$ relative to periodic full-map sharing. Across matched benchmark scenarios, the proposed method achieved $91.5\%$ coverage with no capability-infeasible allocations, compared with $78.8\%$ coverage and a $21.5\%$ capability-infeasible allocation rate for LS-MCPP. Semantic corrections update the shared planning state without requiring repeated transmission of the complete map.