CONCERTO and CHAMBER: A Method and Benchmark for Contact-Rich Ad-Hoc Teamwork with Opaque, Heterogeneous Teammates — Project Announcement v0.1

We announce Chamber, the first benchmark for heterogeneous multi-robot ad-hoc teamwork in contact-rich manipulation, and Concerto, a reference method for the same setting. Prior work addresses heterogeneity, black-box partners, formal safety, or contact-rich manipulation separately; their intersection is empty in the published literature. Chamber decomposes heterogeneity into six measurable sub-axes (action space, observation modality, control rate, communication degradation, partner familiarity, and safety), each gated by a pre-registered ≥20 percentage-point homogeneous- versus-heterogeneous gap rule. Concerto composes an exponential CBF-QP backbone, a conformal slack overlay with a distribution-free long-term risk bound, an operational-space CBF inner filter, and a hard braking fallback, wrapped by a frozen-partner ego-AHT training loop. This announcement records the design contributions, the pre-registration protocol, and the public reference implementation; empirical evaluation will be reported in a companion paper as the staged Phase-0 spikes complete.