Abstract We introduce the Maximum Sustainable Yield problem for a multi-robot foraging and construction system, inspired by the relationship between the natural resource growth and harvesting behaviors in an ecosystem. The resources spawn according to the logistic model and are vulnerable to overharvesting. The robots must maintain sustainability while maximizing productivity. The foraging robots harvest different types of resources, which enable a construction robot to build new foraging robots. We design algorithms to perform robot construction, assignment, and scheduling. We propose an adaptive algorithm to overcome the problem that resource growth model is often unknown. We demonstrate that our algorithms are robust to noises in the actuation and the environment. The case where the observation noise could harm sustainability is discussed