Attention Based Communication and Control for Multi-UAV Path Planning
This addresses path planning for multi-UAV systems, with incremental improvements in efficiency and safety.
The paper tackles multi-UAV path planning by proposing an iterative single-head attention (ISHA) mechanism, which achieves faster travel and lower collision risks compared to a baseline, especially under limited communication resources.
Inspired by the multi-head attention (MHA) mechanism in natural language processing, this letter proposes an iterative single-head attention (ISHA) mechanism for multi-UAV path planning. The ISHA mechanism is run by a communication helper collecting the state embeddings of UAVs and distributing an attention score vector to each UAV. The attention scores computed by ISHA identify how many interactions with other UAVs should be considered in each UAV's control decision-making. Simulation results corroborate that the ISHA-based communication and control framework achieves faster travel with lower inter-UAV collision risks than an MHA-aided baseline, particularly under limited communication resources.