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Main Authors: Zhou, Quanxi, Mao, Wencan, Liang, Yilei, Tsukada, Manabu, Liu, Yunling, Crowcroft, Jon
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18596
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author Zhou, Quanxi
Mao, Wencan
Liang, Yilei
Tsukada, Manabu
Liu, Yunling
Crowcroft, Jon
author_facet Zhou, Quanxi
Mao, Wencan
Liang, Yilei
Tsukada, Manabu
Liu, Yunling
Crowcroft, Jon
contents The widespread application of wireless communication technology has promoted the development of smart agriculture, where unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play a multifunctional role. We target a multi-UAV smart agriculture system where UAVs cooperatively perform data collection, image acquisition, and communication tasks. In this context, we model a Markov decision process to solve the multi-UAV trajectory planning problem. Moreover, we propose a novel Elite Imitation Actor-Shared Ensemble Critic (EIA-SEC) framework, where agents adaptively learn from the elite agent to reduce trial-and-error costs, and a shared ensemble critic collaborates with each agent's local critic to ensure unbiased objective value estimates and prevent overestimation. Experimental results demonstrate that EIA-SEC outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of reward performance, training stability, and convergence speed.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_18596
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EIA-SEC: Improved Actor-Critic Framework for Multi-UAV Collaborative Control in Smart Agriculture
Zhou, Quanxi
Mao, Wencan
Liang, Yilei
Tsukada, Manabu
Liu, Yunling
Crowcroft, Jon
Machine Learning
The widespread application of wireless communication technology has promoted the development of smart agriculture, where unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play a multifunctional role. We target a multi-UAV smart agriculture system where UAVs cooperatively perform data collection, image acquisition, and communication tasks. In this context, we model a Markov decision process to solve the multi-UAV trajectory planning problem. Moreover, we propose a novel Elite Imitation Actor-Shared Ensemble Critic (EIA-SEC) framework, where agents adaptively learn from the elite agent to reduce trial-and-error costs, and a shared ensemble critic collaborates with each agent's local critic to ensure unbiased objective value estimates and prevent overestimation. Experimental results demonstrate that EIA-SEC outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of reward performance, training stability, and convergence speed.
title EIA-SEC: Improved Actor-Critic Framework for Multi-UAV Collaborative Control in Smart Agriculture
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18596