Scaling up Energy-Aware Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Mission-Oriented Drone Networks with Individual Reward

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Changling, Li, Ying
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Li, Changling
Li, Ying
author_facet Li, Changling
Li, Ying
contents Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown wide applicability in collaborative systems such as autonomous driving and smart cities for its ability of learning through interaction. With the recent development of drone networks, researchers have also applied MARL to address the trajectory planning problems. However, the dynamic environment and the limited battery capacity are still challenging for using MARL to achieve efficient collaborative task execution. In this paper, we propose an energy-aware MARL model as an attempt to tackle these challenges, leveraging Deep Q-Networks (DQN) with \emph{individual reward functions} driven by the task execution progress and the remaining battery of drones. We conduct a set of simulation studies for the proposed mode and compare it with the shared reward MARL~\cite{Li2022MARL} to explore the impact of credit assignment in MARL. The results indicate that our proposed model can achieve at least 80\% success rate regardless of the task locations and lengths. Similar to the shared reward mode, the individual reward mode can achieve a better success rate when the task density is high, and it can hit nearly a 100\% success rate when task density gets close to 40\%. The true advantage of our proposed model with individual reward is revealed when scaling up the environment. The comparison to the shared reward MARL shows that the our proposed model is more robust towards the change of the environment size and agent numbers. It can achieve higher success rate with fewer steps due to the clarity of the goal which improves energy efficiency even better.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_24992
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scaling up Energy-Aware Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Mission-Oriented Drone Networks with Individual Reward
Li, Changling
Li, Ying
Networking and Internet Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown wide applicability in collaborative systems such as autonomous driving and smart cities for its ability of learning through interaction. With the recent development of drone networks, researchers have also applied MARL to address the trajectory planning problems. However, the dynamic environment and the limited battery capacity are still challenging for using MARL to achieve efficient collaborative task execution. In this paper, we propose an energy-aware MARL model as an attempt to tackle these challenges, leveraging Deep Q-Networks (DQN) with \emph{individual reward functions} driven by the task execution progress and the remaining battery of drones. We conduct a set of simulation studies for the proposed mode and compare it with the shared reward MARL~\cite{Li2022MARL} to explore the impact of credit assignment in MARL. The results indicate that our proposed model can achieve at least 80\% success rate regardless of the task locations and lengths. Similar to the shared reward mode, the individual reward mode can achieve a better success rate when the task density is high, and it can hit nearly a 100\% success rate when task density gets close to 40\%. The true advantage of our proposed model with individual reward is revealed when scaling up the environment. The comparison to the shared reward MARL shows that the our proposed model is more robust towards the change of the environment size and agent numbers. It can achieve higher success rate with fewer steps due to the clarity of the goal which improves energy efficiency even better.
title Scaling up Energy-Aware Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Mission-Oriented Drone Networks with Individual Reward
topic Networking and Internet Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24992