Deep Reinforcement Learning for Swarm Systems

Recently, deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been applied successfully to multi-agent scenarios. Typically, these methods rely on a concatenation of agent states to represent the information content required for decentralized decision making. However, concatenation scales poorly to swarm systems with a large number of homogeneous agents as it does not exploit the fundamental properties inherent to these systems: (i) the agents in the swarm are interchangeable and (ii) the exact number of agents in the swarm is irrelevant. Therefore, we propose a new state representation for deep multi-agent RL based on mean embeddings of distributions. We treat the agents as samples of a distribution and use the empirical mean embedding as input for a decentralized policy. We define different feature spaces of the mean embedding using histograms, radial basis functions and a neural network learned end-to-end. We evaluate the representation on two well known problems from the swarm literature (rendezvous and pursuit evasion), in a globally and locally observable setup. For the local setup we furthermore introduce simple communication protocols. Of all approaches, the mean embedding representation using neural network features enables the richest information exchange between neighboring agents facilitating the development of more complex collective strategies.Comment: 31 pages, 12 figures, version 3 (published in JMLR Volume 20

Radial Basis Function Neural Networks : A Review

Radial Basis Function neural networks (RBFNNs) represent an attractive alternative to other neural network models. One reason is that they form a unifying link between function approximation, regularization, noisy interpolation, classification and density estimation. It is also the case that training RBF neural networks is faster than training multi-layer perceptron networks. RBFNN learning is usually split into an unsupervised part, where center and widths of the Gaussian basis functions are set, and a linear supervised part for weight computation. This paper reviews various learning methods for determining centers, widths, and synaptic weights of RBFNN. In addition, we will point to some applications of RBFNN in various fields. In the end, we name software that can be used for implementing RBFNNs

Learning enhancement of radial basis function network with particle swarm optimization

Back propagation (BP) algorithm is the most common technique in Artificial Neural Network (ANN) learning, and this includes Radial Basis Function Network. However, major disadvantages of BP are its convergence rate is relatively slow and always being trapped at the local minima. To overcome this problem, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) has been implemented to enhance ANN learning to increase the performance of network in terms of convergence rate and accuracy. In Back Propagation Radial Basis Function Network (BP-RBFN), there are many elements to be considered. These include the number of input nodes, hidden nodes, output nodes, learning rate, bias, minimum error and activation/transfer functions. These elements will affect the speed of RBF Network learning. In this study, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is incorporated into RBF Network to enhance the learning performance of the network. Two algorithms have been developed on error optimization for Back Propagation of Radial Basis Function Network (BP-RBFN) and Particle Swarm Optimization of Radial Basis Function Network (PSO-RBFN) to seek and generate better network performance. The results show that PSO-RBFN give promising outputs with faster convergence rate and better classifications compared to BP-RBFN

Adaptive and learning-based formation control of swarm robots

Autonomous aerial and wheeled mobile robots play a major role in tasks such as search and rescue, transportation, monitoring, and inspection. However, these operations are faced with a few open challenges including robust autonomy, and adaptive coordination based on the environment and operating conditions, particularly in swarm robots with limited communication and perception capabilities. Furthermore, the computational complexity increases exponentially with the number of robots in the swarm. This thesis examines two different aspects of the formation control problem. On the one hand, we investigate how formation could be performed by swarm robots with limited communication and perception (e.g., Crazyflie nano quadrotor). On the other hand, we explore human-swarm interaction (HSI) and different shared-control mechanisms between human and swarm robots (e.g., BristleBot) for artistic creation. In particular, we combine bio-inspired (i.e., flocking, foraging) techniques with learning-based control strategies (using artificial neural networks) for adaptive control of multi- robots. We first review how learning-based control and networked dynamical systems can be used to assign distributed and decentralized policies to individual robots such that the desired formation emerges from their collective behavior. We proceed by presenting a novel flocking control for UAV swarm using deep reinforcement learning. We formulate the flocking formation problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), and consider a leader-follower configuration, where consensus among all UAVs is used to train a shared control policy, and each UAV performs actions based on the local information it collects. In addition, to avoid collision among UAVs and guarantee flocking and navigation, a reward function is added with the global flocking maintenance, mutual reward, and a collision penalty. We adapt deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) with centralized training and decentralized execution to obtain the flocking control policy using actor-critic networks and a global state space matrix. In the context of swarm robotics in arts, we investigate how the formation paradigm can serve as an interaction modality for artists to aesthetically utilize swarms. In particular, we explore particle swarm optimization (PSO) and random walk to control the communication between a team of robots with swarming behavior for musical creation

State-of-the-art in aerodynamic shape optimisation methods

Aerodynamic optimisation has become an indispensable component for any aerodynamic design over the past 60 years, with applications to aircraft, cars, trains, bridges, wind turbines, internal pipe flows, and cavities, among others, and is thus relevant in many facets of technology. With advancements in computational power, automated design optimisation procedures have become more competent, however, there is an ambiguity and bias throughout the literature with regards to relative performance of optimisation architectures and employed algorithms. This paper provides a well-balanced critical review of the dominant optimisation approaches that have been integrated with aerodynamic theory for the purpose of shape optimisation. A total of 229 papers, published in more than 120 journals and conference proceedings, have been classified into 6 different optimisation algorithm approaches. The material cited includes some of the most well-established authors and publications in the field of aerodynamic optimisation. This paper aims to eliminate bias toward certain algorithms by analysing the limitations, drawbacks, and the benefits of the most utilised optimisation approaches. This review provides comprehensive but straightforward insight for non-specialists and reference detailing the current state for specialist practitioners

Agent swarm classification network ASCN

In this paper we introduced a newly RBF Classification Network - "Agent Swarm Classification Network ASCN", which is trained by a Multi-agent systems (MAS) approach. MAS can be regarded as a swarm of independent software agents interact with each other to achieve common goals, complete concurrent distributed tasks under autonomous control. By treating each neuron as an agent, the weights of neurons can be determined through a set of pre-defined simple agent behavior. Three sets of experiments are examined to observe the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2004 IEEE.published_or_final_versio