Independent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient Reinforcement Learning in Cooperative Multiagent Pursuit Games

In this paper, we study a fully decentralized multi-agent pursuit problem in a non-communication environment. Fully decentralized (decentralized training and decentralized execution) has stronger robustness and scalability compared with centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE), which is the current popular multi-agent reinforcement learning method. Both centralized training and communication mechanism require a large amount of information exchange between agents, which are strong assumptions that are difficult to meet in reality. However, traditional fully decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning methods (e.g., IQL) are difficult to converge stably due to the dynamic changes of other agents’ strategies. Therefore, we extend actor-critic to actor-critic-N framework, and propose Potential-Field-Guided Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (PGDDPG) method on this basis. The agent uses the unified artificial potential field to guide the agent’s strategy updating, which reduces the uncertainty of multi-agent’s decision making in the complex and dynamic changing environment. Thus, PGDDPG which we proposed can converge fast and stably. Finally, through the pursuit experiments in MPE and CARLA, we prove that our method achieves higher success rate and more stable performance than DDPG and MADDPG.