Towards Robust Multi-UAV Collaboration: MARL with Noise-Resilient Communication and Attention Mechanisms
This addresses robust collaboration for UAVs in remote sensing, but it is incremental as it builds on existing MARL methods.
The paper tackles robust path planning for multiple UAVs in noisy environments by proposing a MARL framework with attention-based communication, achieving a 78% improvement in entropy reduction.
Efficient path planning for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is crucial in remote sensing and information collection. As task scales expand, the cooperative deployment of multiple UAVs significantly improves information collection efficiency. However, collaborative communication and decision-making for multiple UAVs remain major challenges in path planning, especially in noisy environments. To efficiently accomplish complex information collection tasks in 3D space and address robust communication issues, we propose a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework for UAV path planning based on the Counterfactual Multi-Agent Policy Gradients (COMA) algorithm. The framework incorporates attention mechanism-based UAV communication protocol and training-deployment system, significantly improving communication robustness and individual decision-making capabilities in noisy conditions. Experiments conducted on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing algorithms in terms of path planning efficiency and robustness, especially in noisy environments, achieving a 78\% improvement in entropy reduction.