UDON: Uncertainty-weighted Distributed Optimization for Multi-Robot Neural Implicit Mapping under Extreme Communication Constraints

Abstract: Multi-robot mapping with neural implicit representations enables the compact reconstruction of complex environments. However, it demands robustness against communication challenges like packet loss and limited bandwidth. While prior works have introduced various mechanisms to mitigate communication disruptions, performance degradation still occurs under extremely low communication success rates. This paper presents UDON, a real-time multi-agent neural implicit mapping framework that introduces a novel uncertainty-weighted distributed optimization to achieve high-quality mapping under severe communication deterioration. The uncertainty weighting prioritizes more reliable portions of the map, while the distributed optimization isolates and penalizes mapping disagreement between individual pairs of communicating agents. We conduct extensive experiments on standard benchmark datasets and real-world robot hardware. We demonstrate that UDON significantly outperforms existing baselines, maintaining high-fidelity reconstructions and consistent scene representations even under extreme communication degradation (as low as 1% success rate).