Distributed Reinforcement Learning for Cooperative Multi-Robot Object Manipulation

21 Mar 2020 · Guohui Ding, Joewie J. Koh, Kelly Merckaert, Bram Vanderborght, Marco M. Nicotra, Christoffer Heckman, Alessandro Roncone, Lijun Chen ·

We consider solving a cooperative multi-robot object manipulation task using reinforcement learning (RL). We propose two distributed multi-agent RL approaches: distributed approximate RL (DA-RL), where each agent applies Q-learning with individual reward functions; and game-theoretic RL (GT-RL), where the agents update their Q-values based on the Nash equilibrium of a bimatrix Q-value game. We validate the proposed approaches in the setting of cooperative object manipulation with two simulated robot arms. Although we focus on a small system of two agents in this paper, both DA-RL and GT-RL apply to general multi-agent systems, and are expected to scale well to large systems.

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