arXiv:2409.13065cs.MAcs.RO2024-09被引 4

多智能体协同探查,信息增益提升两倍,还能在通信中断时自动适应。

Multi-Agent Vulcan: An Information-Driven Multi-Agent Path Finding Approach

  • 将多车路径规划与信息增益结合,用可分解的启发式方法实现高效协同。
  • 在部分通信条件下仍能保持性能,最多比其他方法多发现200%的独特现象。
  • 适合资源受限的野外探测、灾害救援等需多车协作的实时场景。

科学家在探索新环境时常寻找感兴趣的现象。自主车辆被用于此类区域,以替代成本高或危险的人工操作。在线控制自主车辆进行信息采集称为自适应采样,可建模为以信息增益为核心目标的部分可观马尔可夫决策过程(POMDP)。以往研究主要聚焦单智能体场景,本文面对多智能体自适应采样中的独特挑战:避免重复观测、防止车辆碰撞、以及在通信受限下的路径规划。我们基于多智能体路径规划(MAPF)方法,通过将MAPF问题分解为一系列单智能体路径规划问题来解决碰撞问题。随后提出信息驱动的MAPF方法,在有限通信下实现多智能体信息增益最大化。首先,引入一个可接受的启发式函数,将互信息增益松弛为可独立计算的加性函数;其次,扩展为分布式系统,具备对通信受限的鲁棒性。当所有智能体在通信范围内时,全局联合规划以最大化信息增益;当部分智能体移出范围时,形成通信子群,子群内独立规划。由于远离的车辆重复观测概率低,该方法仅带来少量信息增益损失,实现了从全通信到部分通信的平滑过渡。我们在多种场景下评估该方法,包括真实机器人应用,结果表明在某些场景下,信息发现量最多提升200%,且每个智能体首次定位独特现象的时间最快缩短50%。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Scientists often search for phenomena of interest while exploring new environments. Autonomous vehicles are deployed to explore such areas where human-operated vehicles would be costly or dangerous. Online control of autonomous vehicles for information-gathering is called adaptive sampling and can be framed as a POMDP that uses information gain as its principal objective. While prior work focuses largely on single-agent scenarios, this paper confronts challenges unique to multi-agent adaptive sampling, such as avoiding redundant observations, preventing vehicle collision, and facilitating path planning under limited communication. We start with Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) methods, which address collision avoidance by decomposing the MAPF problem into a series of single-agent path planning problems. We then present information-driven MAPF which addresses multi-agent information gain under limited communication. First, we introduce an admissible heuristic that relaxes mutual information gain to an additive function that can be evaluated as a set of independent single agent path planning problems. Second, we extend our approach to a distributed system that is robust to limited communication. When all agents are in range, the group plans jointly to maximize information. When some agents move out of range, communicating subgroups are formed and the subgroups plan independently. Since redundant observations are less likely when vehicles are far apart, this approach only incurs a small loss in information gain, resulting in an approach that gracefully transitions from full to partial communication. We evaluate our method against other adaptive sampling strategies across various scenarios, including real-world robotic applications. Our method was able to locate up to 200% more unique phenomena in certain scenarios, and each agent located its first unique phenomenon faster by up to 50%.

多智能体路径规划信息增益自适应采样

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