Dec-MARVEL: Decentralized Multi-Agent Exploration without Communication under Budget Constraints

Multi-UAV exploration is often constrained by unreliable communication, limited field-of-view sensing (e.g., lightweight onboard camera), and finite travel budgets that require each robot to reserve enough budget to return to its base. We present Dec-MARVEL, a decentralized, communication-free exploration policy that jointly selects waypoints and sensing headings from each robot's local map, remaining budget, and opportunistic observations of teammates. Across 900 held-out trials spanning three team sizes (2, 4, 8 robots) and three travel budgets (720, 800, and 1024 m) against four baselines, Dec-MARVEL achieves the highest or tied-highest exploration and success rates and the shortest reported travel to 99% merged coverage among successful trials in all nine budget--team configurations. Under our tightest 720 m budget, it reaches 46%, 84%, and 94% success for 2, 4, and 8 robots, versus 17%, 57%, and 85% for the strongest baseline in each case. Physical-robot experiments show that the resulting waypoint-heading plans are executable and remain budget-feasible.