Scalable Planning and Learning Framework Development for Swarm-to-Swarm Engagement Problems
This addresses a domain-specific problem for military or robotics applications involving swarm-to-swarm engagements, but it is incremental as it builds on existing reinforcement learning and pursuit-evasion concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of planning swarm allocations and trajectories for engaging with enemy swarms, which is understudied and scales poorly with existing methods, by proposing a reinforcement learning framework that decomposes large-scale swarm engagement into independent multi-agent pursuit-evasion games, achieving finite time capture under certain conditions in simulations.
Development of guidance, navigation and control frameworks/algorithms for swarms attracted significant attention in recent years. That being said, algorithms for planning swarm allocations/trajectories for engaging with enemy swarms is largely an understudied problem. Although small-scale scenarios can be addressed with tools from differential game theory, existing approaches fail to scale for large-scale multi-agent pursuit evasion (PE) scenarios. In this work, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) based framework to decompose to large-scale swarm engagement problems into a number of independent multi-agent pursuit-evasion games. We simulate a variety of multi-agent PE scenarios, where finite time capture is guaranteed under certain conditions. The calculated PE statistics are provided as a reward signal to the high level allocation layer, which uses an RL algorithm to allocate controlled swarm units to eliminate enemy swarm units with maximum efficiency. We verify our approach in large-scale swarm-to-swarm engagement simulations.