Deep-Unfolded Coordination
For multi-agent robotics practitioners, this work provides a method to automatically tune distributed optimization hyperparameters, reducing manual effort and improving solve-time efficiency.
Deep Coordinator, a deep-unfolding framework, learns to dynamically adjust hyperparameters of the ADMM-DDP distributed solver for multi-agent robotics, achieving 6.18-9.44x faster trajectory generation with comparable quality and retaining performance on systems up to 8x larger than trained on.
Distributed optimization is a highly scalable and structurally transparent technique to solve multi-agent robotics problems; however, such methods often suffer from the need for highly-specialized, problem-specific hyperparameter tunings. In this work, we propose Deep Coordinator, a deep-unfolding framework that learns to dynamically adjust the hyperparameters of ADMM-DDP, a popular distributed solver for robotics tasks, at solve-time in response to optimizer performance. Our architecture consists of unrolling a fixed number of ADMM-DDP iterations into a neural network with learnable functions between layers mapping the optimizer state to the next hyperparameters. To the best of our knowledge, Deep Coordinator is the first deep-unfolding framework to adapt the penalty parameters of a non-convex optimizer at solve-time; we show that the mainstream supervised approach can yield degenerate solutions when training such models, and propose an unsupervised learning scheme. On simulations with fleets of cars and quadrotors, Deep Coordinator produces trajectories of comparable quality 6.18-9.44x faster than conventional solvers. Furthermore, Deep Coordinator retains its performance benefits when deployed to systems up to 8x larger than trained on.