1,299 research outputs found
Towards adaptive multi-robot systems: self-organization and self-adaptation
Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.The development of complex systems ensembles that operate in uncertain environments is a major challenge. The reason for this is that system designers are not able to fully specify the system during specification and development and before it is being deployed. Natural swarm systems enjoy similar characteristics, yet, being self-adaptive and being able to self-organize, these systems show beneficial emergent behaviour. Similar concepts can be extremely helpful for artificial systems, especially when it comes to multi-robot scenarios, which require such solution in order to be applicable to highly uncertain real world application. In this article, we present a comprehensive overview over state-of-the-art solutions in emergent systems, self-organization, self-adaptation, and robotics. We discuss these approaches in the light of a framework for multi-robot systems and identify similarities, differences missing links and open gaps that have to be addressed in order to make this framework possible
Multiagent Learning Through Indirect Encoding
Designing a system of multiple, heterogeneous agents that cooperate to achieve a common goal is a difficult task, but it is also a common real-world problem. Multiagent learning addresses this problem by training the team to cooperate through a learning algorithm. However, most traditional approaches treat multiagent learning as a combination of multiple single-agent learning problems. This perspective leads to many inefficiencies in learning such as the problem of reinvention, whereby fundamental skills and policies that all agents should possess must be rediscovered independently for each team member. For example, in soccer, all the players know how to pass and kick the ball, but a traditional algorithm has no way to share such vital information because it has no way to relate the policies of agents to each other. In this dissertation a new approach to multiagent learning that seeks to address these issues is presented. This approach, called multiagent HyperNEAT, represents teams as a pattern of policies rather than individual agents. The main idea is that an agent’s location within a canonical team layout (such as a soccer team at the start of a game) tends to dictate its role within that team, called the policy geometry. For example, as soccer positions move from goal to center they become more offensive and less defensive, a concept that is compactly represented as a pattern. iii The first major contribution of this dissertation is a new method for evolving neural network controllers called HyperNEAT, which forms the foundation of the second contribution and primary focus of this work, multiagent HyperNEAT. Multiagent learning in this dissertation is investigated in predator-prey, room-clearing, and patrol domains, providing a real-world context for the approach. Interestingly, because the teams in multiagent HyperNEAT are represented as patterns they can scale up to an infinite number of multiagent policies that can be sampled from the policy geometry as needed. Thus the third contribution is a method for teams trained with multiagent HyperNEAT to dynamically scale their size without further learning. Fourth, the capabilities to both learn and scale in multiagent HyperNEAT are compared to the traditional multiagent SARSA(λ) approach in a comprehensive study. The fifth contribution is a method for efficiently learning and encoding multiple policies for each agent on a team to facilitate learning in multi-task domains. Finally, because there is significant interest in practical applications of multiagent learning, multiagent HyperNEAT is tested in a real-world military patrolling application with actual Khepera III robots. The ultimate goal is to provide a new perspective on multiagent learning and to demonstrate the practical benefits of training heterogeneous, scalable multiagent teams through generative encoding
Learning with Opponent-Learning Awareness
Multi-agent settings are quickly gathering importance in machine learning.
This includes a plethora of recent work on deep multi-agent reinforcement
learning, but also can be extended to hierarchical RL, generative adversarial
networks and decentralised optimisation. In all these settings the presence of
multiple learning agents renders the training problem non-stationary and often
leads to unstable training or undesired final results. We present Learning with
Opponent-Learning Awareness (LOLA), a method in which each agent shapes the
anticipated learning of the other agents in the environment. The LOLA learning
rule includes a term that accounts for the impact of one agent's policy on the
anticipated parameter update of the other agents. Results show that the
encounter of two LOLA agents leads to the emergence of tit-for-tat and
therefore cooperation in the iterated prisoners' dilemma, while independent
learning does not. In this domain, LOLA also receives higher payouts compared
to a naive learner, and is robust against exploitation by higher order
gradient-based methods. Applied to repeated matching pennies, LOLA agents
converge to the Nash equilibrium. In a round robin tournament we show that LOLA
agents successfully shape the learning of a range of multi-agent learning
algorithms from literature, resulting in the highest average returns on the
IPD. We also show that the LOLA update rule can be efficiently calculated using
an extension of the policy gradient estimator, making the method suitable for
model-free RL. The method thus scales to large parameter and input spaces and
nonlinear function approximators. We apply LOLA to a grid world task with an
embedded social dilemma using recurrent policies and opponent modelling. By
explicitly considering the learning of the other agent, LOLA agents learn to
cooperate out of self-interest. The code is at github.com/alshedivat/lola
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