A drl based distributed formation control scheme with stream based collision avoidance
This addresses the problem of scalable multi-agent coordination in unknown environments for autonomous systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing DRL and stream-based methods.
The paper tackled distributed formation control and collision avoidance for autonomous vehicles using deep reinforcement learning, achieving better performance than two state-of-the-art algorithms in simulations.
Formation and collision avoidance abilities are essential for multi-agent systems. Conventional methods usually require a central controller and global information to achieve collaboration, which is impractical in an unknown environment. In this paper, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based distributed formation control scheme for autonomous vehicles. A modified stream-based obstacle avoidance method is applied to smoothen the optimal trajectory, and onboard sensors such as Lidar and antenna arrays are used to obtain local relative distance and angle information. The proposed scheme obtains a scalable distributed control policy which jointly optimizes formation tracking error and average collision rate with local observations. Simulation results demonstrate that our method outperforms two other state-of-the-art algorithms on maintaining formation and collision avoidance.