This paper studies heterogeneous multi-team collaboration through dynamic robot allocation, where robots are treated as transferable resources. Leveraging Hamilton's rule from ecology as an altruistic decision-making mechanism, we propose a multi-team collaborative resource allocation framework with heterogeneous capabilities, transfer costs, and capability-dependent contributions. The resulting allocation problem is combinatorial and is shown to be NP-hard. To address scalability, we develop a graph neural network policy under centralized training and decentralized execution that approximates the altruistic allocations based on Hamilton's rule. The model operates over the team interaction graph and predicts robot-level transfer decisions and next robot-to-team assignments. The proposed approach is validated in a firefighting scenario through simulations and experiments, demonstrating that the learned policy achieves near-optimal performance while scaling to larger systems.
@article{arxiv.2605.21723,
title = {Learning Altruistic Collaboration in Heterogeneous Multi-Team Systems},
author = {Riwa Karam and Ruoyu Lin and Brooks A. Butler and Magnus Egerstedt},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.21723},
year = {2026}
}