Cooperative Multiagent Attentional Communication for Large-Scale Task Space

Qijie Zou, Youkun Hu* (Corresponding Author), Dewei Yi, Bing Gao, Jing Qin, Chi-Hua Chen (Editor)

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)
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Abstract

With the rapid development of mobile robots, they have begun to be widely used in industrial manufacturing, logistics scheduling, intelligent medical, and other fields. For large-scale task space, the communication between multiagents is the key to affect cooperation productivity, and agents can coordinate more effectively with the help of dynamic communication. However, the traditional communication mechanism uses simple message aggregation and broadcast and, in some cases, lacks the distinction of the importance of information. Multiagent deep reinforcement learning (MDRL) is valid to solve the problem of informational coordination strategies. However, how different messages affect each agent’s decision-making process remains a challenging task for large-scale task. To solve this problem, we propose IMANet (Import Message Attention Network). It divides the decision-making process into two substages: communication and action, where communication is considered to be part of the environment. First, an attention mechanism based on query vectors is introduced. The correlation between the query vector agent’s own information and the current state information of other agents is estimated, and then, the results are used to distinguish the importance of information from other agents. Second, the LSTM network is used as the unit controller for each agent, and individual rewards are used to guide the agent training after communication. Finally, IMANet is evaluated on tasks on challenging multi-agent platforms, Predator and Prey (PP), and traffic junction. The results show that IMANet can improve the efficiency of learning and training, especially when applied to large-scale task space, with a success rate 12% higher than CommNet in baseline experiments.
Original languageEnglish
Article number4401653
Number of pages13
JournalWireless Communications and Mobile Computing
Volume2022
Early online date24 Jan 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 24 Jan 2022

Bibliographical note

Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Dalian University Research Platform Project Funding: Dalian Wise Information Technology of Med and Health Key Laboratory, the National Natural Science Foundation of China: Research on the stability of multi-surface high-speed unmanned boat formation and the method of cooperative collision avoidance in complex sea conditions, NO.61673084.

Data Availability Statement

The data used to support the findings of this study are available from the authors upon request.

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