LPAC: Learnable Perception-Action-Communication Loops with Applications to Coverage Control

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Agarwal, Saurav, Muthukrishnan, Ramya, Gosrich, Walker, Kumar, Vijay, Ribeiro, Alejandro
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Agarwal, Saurav
Muthukrishnan, Ramya
Gosrich, Walker
Kumar, Vijay
Ribeiro, Alejandro
author_facet Agarwal, Saurav
Muthukrishnan, Ramya
Gosrich, Walker
Kumar, Vijay
Ribeiro, Alejandro
contents Coverage control is the problem of navigating a robot swarm to collaboratively monitor features or a phenomenon of interest not known a priori. The problem is challenging in decentralized settings with robots that have limited communication and sensing capabilities. We propose a learnable Perception-Action-Communication (LPAC) architecture for the problem, wherein a convolutional neural network (CNN) processes localized perception; a graph neural network (GNN) facilitates robot communications; finally, a shallow multi-layer perceptron (MLP) computes robot actions. The GNN enables collaboration in the robot swarm by computing what information to communicate with nearby robots and how to incorporate received information. Evaluations show that the LPAC models -- trained using imitation learning -- outperform standard decentralized and centralized coverage control algorithms. The learned policy generalizes to environments different from the training dataset, transfers to larger environments with more robots, and is robust to noisy position estimates. The results indicate the suitability of LPAC architectures for decentralized navigation in robot swarms to achieve collaborative behavior.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_04855
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LPAC: Learnable Perception-Action-Communication Loops with Applications to Coverage Control
Agarwal, Saurav
Muthukrishnan, Ramya
Gosrich, Walker
Kumar, Vijay
Ribeiro, Alejandro
Robotics
Machine Learning
Coverage control is the problem of navigating a robot swarm to collaboratively monitor features or a phenomenon of interest not known a priori. The problem is challenging in decentralized settings with robots that have limited communication and sensing capabilities. We propose a learnable Perception-Action-Communication (LPAC) architecture for the problem, wherein a convolutional neural network (CNN) processes localized perception; a graph neural network (GNN) facilitates robot communications; finally, a shallow multi-layer perceptron (MLP) computes robot actions. The GNN enables collaboration in the robot swarm by computing what information to communicate with nearby robots and how to incorporate received information. Evaluations show that the LPAC models -- trained using imitation learning -- outperform standard decentralized and centralized coverage control algorithms. The learned policy generalizes to environments different from the training dataset, transfers to larger environments with more robots, and is robust to noisy position estimates. The results indicate the suitability of LPAC architectures for decentralized navigation in robot swarms to achieve collaborative behavior.
title LPAC: Learnable Perception-Action-Communication Loops with Applications to Coverage Control
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.04855