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This paper introduces a hybrid algorithm of deep reinforcement learning (RL) and Force-based motion planning (FMP) to solve distributed motion planning problem in dense and dynamic environments. Individually, RL and FMP algorithms each have their own limitations. FMP is not able to produce time-optimal paths and existing RL solutions are not able to produce collision-free paths in dense environments. Therefore, we first tried improving the performance of recent RL approaches by introducing a new reward function that not only eliminates the requirement of a pre supervised learning (SL) step but also decreases the chance of collision in crowded environments. That improved things, but there were still a lot of failure cases. So, we developed a hybrid approach to leverage the simpler FMP approach in stuck, simple and high-risk cases, and continue using RL for normal cases in which FMP cant produce optimal path. Also, we extend GA3C-CADRL algorithm to 3D environment. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms both deep RL and FMP algorithms and produces up to 50% more successful scenarios than deep RL and up to 75% less extra time to reach goal than FMP.
Multi-agent navigation in dynamic environments is of great industrial value when deploying a large scale fleet of robot to real-world applications. This paper proposes a decentralized partially observable multi-agent path planning with evolutionary reinforcement learning (MAPPER) method to learn an effective local planning policy in mixed dynamic environments. Reinforcement learning-based methods usually suffer performance degradation on long-horizon tasks with goal-conditioned sparse rewards, so we decompose the long-range navigation task into many easier sub-tasks under the guidance of a global planner, which increases agents performance in large environments. Moreover, most existing multi-agent planning approaches assume either perfect information of the surrounding environment or homogeneity of nearby dynamic agents, which may not hold in practice. Our approach models dynamic obstacles behavior with an image-based representation and trains a policy in mixed dynamic environments without homogeneity assumption. To ensure multi-agent training stability and performance, we propose an evolutionary training approach that can be easily scaled to large and complex environments. Experiments show that MAPPER is able to achieve higher success rates and more stable performance when exposed to a large number of non-cooperative dynamic obstacles compared with traditional reaction-based planner LRA* and the state-of-the-art learning-based method.
Social learning is a key component of human and animal intelligence. By taking cues from the behavior of experts in their environment, social learners can acquire sophisticated behavior and rapidly adapt to new circumstances. This paper investigates whether independent reinforcement learning (RL) agents in a multi-agent environment can learn to use social learning to improve their performance. We find that in most circumstances, vanilla model-free RL agents do not use social learning. We analyze the reasons for this deficiency, and show that by imposing constraints on the training environment and introducing a model-based auxiliary loss we are able to obtain generalized social learning policies which enable agents to: i) discover complex skills that are not learned from single-agent training, and ii) adapt online to novel environments by taking cues from experts present in the new environment. In contrast, agents trained with model-free RL or imitation learning generalize poorly and do not succeed in the transfer tasks. By mixing multi-agent and solo training, we can obtain agents that use social learning to gain skills that they can deploy when alone, even out-performing agents trained alone from the start.
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) requires coordination to efficiently solve certain tasks. Fully centralized control is often infeasible in such domains due to the size of joint action spaces. Coordination graph based formalization allows reasoning about the joint action based on the structure of interactions. However, they often require domain expertise in their design. This paper introduces the deep implicit coordination graph (DICG) architecture for such scenarios. DICG consists of a module for inferring the dynamic coordination graph structure which is then used by a graph neural network based module to learn to implicitly reason about the joint actions or values. DICG allows learning the tradeoff between full centralization and decentralization via standard actor-critic methods to significantly improve coordination for domains with large number of agents. We apply DICG to both centralized-training-centralized-execution and centralized-training-decentralized-execution regimes. We demonstrate that DICG solves the relative overgeneralization pathology in predatory-prey tasks as well as outperforms various MARL baselines on the challenging StarCraft II Multi-agent Challenge (SMAC) and traffic junction environments.
Deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) holds the promise of automating the acquisition of complex controllers that can map sensory inputs directly to low-level actions. In the domain of robotic locomotion, deep RL could enable learning locomotion skills with minimal engineering and without an explicit model of the robot dynamics. Unfortunately, applying deep RL to real-world robotic tasks is exceptionally difficult, primarily due to poor sample complexity and sensitivity to hyperparameters. While hyperparameters can be easily tuned in simulated domains, tuning may be prohibitively expensive on physical systems, such as legged robots, that can be damaged through extensive trial-and-error learning. In this paper, we propose a sample-efficient deep RL algorithm based on maximum entropy RL that requires minimal per-task tuning and only a modest number of trials to learn neural network policies. We apply this method to learning walking gaits on a real-world Minitaur robot. Our method can acquire a stable gait from scratch directly in the real world in about two hours, without relying on any model or simulation, and the resulting policy is robust to moderate variations in the environment. We further show that our algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance on simulated benchmarks with a single set of hyperparameters. Videos of training and the learned policy can be found on the project website.
Solving tasks with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in reinforcement learning. In the single-agent setting, this challenge is addressed by introducing intrinsic rewards that motivate agents to explore unseen regions of their state spaces; however, applying these techniques naively to the multi-agent setting results in agents exploring independently, without any coordination among themselves. Exploration in cooperative multi-agent settings can be accelerated and improved if agents coordinate their exploration. In this paper we introduce a framework for designing intrinsic rewards which consider what other agents have explored such that the agents can coordinate. Then, we develop an approach for learning how to dynamically select between several exploration modalities to maximize extrinsic rewards. Concretely, we formulate the approach as a hierarchical policy where a high-level controller selects among sets of policies trained on diverse intrinsic rewards and the low-level controllers learn the action policies of all agents under these specific rewards. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in cooperative domains with sparse rewards where state-of-the-art methods fail and challenging multi-stage tasks that necessitate changing modes of coordination.