Shared Backbone PPO for Multi-UAV Communication Coverage with Connection Preservation
For multi-UAV swarm coordination tasks, this work offers an incremental improvement by sharing network backbones and adding graph aggregation to PPO.
The paper introduces a Shared Backbone PPO algorithm for multi-UAV communication coverage with connection preservation, achieving superior performance over standard PPO in a connectivity-preserving task. The method incorporates a graph information aggregation module to enhance cooperation among agents.
This paper proposes a Shared Backbone Proximal Policy Optimization (Shared Backbone PPO) algorithm. By sharing the base module between the Actor and Critic networks, the algorithm achieves efficient training and improved performance. The algorithm is implemented in a connectivity-preserving multi-UAV swarm communication coverage task and compared with the standard PPO algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance. Furthermore, a graph information aggregation module is incorporated into the model architecture to accommodate the communication conditions among agents. With the integration of this module, the algorithm remains effective, and the trained agent swarm exhibits a higher level of cooperation.