Generalization of Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Policies via Awareness and Communication of Capabilities

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Howell, Pierce, Rudolph, Max, Torbati, Reza, Fu, Kevin, Ravichandar, Harish
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Howell, Pierce
Rudolph, Max
Torbati, Reza
Fu, Kevin
Ravichandar, Harish
author_facet Howell, Pierce
Rudolph, Max
Torbati, Reza
Fu, Kevin
Ravichandar, Harish
contents Recent advances in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) are enabling impressive coordination in heterogeneous multi-robot teams. However, existing approaches often overlook the challenge of generalizing learned policies to teams of new compositions, sizes, and robots. While such generalization might not be important in teams of virtual agents that can retrain policies on-demand, it is pivotal in multi-robot systems that are deployed in the real-world and must readily adapt to inevitable changes. As such, multi-robot policies must remain robust to team changes -- an ability we call adaptive teaming. In this work, we investigate if awareness and communication of robot capabilities can provide such generalization by conducting detailed experiments involving an established multi-robot test bed. We demonstrate that shared decentralized policies, that enable robots to be both aware of and communicate their capabilities, can achieve adaptive teaming by implicitly capturing the fundamental relationship between collective capabilities and effective coordination. Videos of trained policies can be viewed at: https://sites.google.com/view/cap-comm
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_13127
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generalization of Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Policies via Awareness and Communication of Capabilities
Howell, Pierce
Rudolph, Max
Torbati, Reza
Fu, Kevin
Ravichandar, Harish
Robotics
Multiagent Systems
Recent advances in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) are enabling impressive coordination in heterogeneous multi-robot teams. However, existing approaches often overlook the challenge of generalizing learned policies to teams of new compositions, sizes, and robots. While such generalization might not be important in teams of virtual agents that can retrain policies on-demand, it is pivotal in multi-robot systems that are deployed in the real-world and must readily adapt to inevitable changes. As such, multi-robot policies must remain robust to team changes -- an ability we call adaptive teaming. In this work, we investigate if awareness and communication of robot capabilities can provide such generalization by conducting detailed experiments involving an established multi-robot test bed. We demonstrate that shared decentralized policies, that enable robots to be both aware of and communicate their capabilities, can achieve adaptive teaming by implicitly capturing the fundamental relationship between collective capabilities and effective coordination. Videos of trained policies can be viewed at: https://sites.google.com/view/cap-comm
title Generalization of Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Policies via Awareness and Communication of Capabilities
topic Robotics
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.13127