Visual swarm navigation via deep reinforcement learning and evolutionary hybrid design

Abstract

Swarm robotics presents a robust and cost-effective paradigm for advanced automation in complex, dynamic environments, such as those encountered in search and rescue or environmental monitoring. A fundamental challenge for this field is the data-driven design of decentralized controllers capable of generating emergent collective behaviors. This paper proposes a novel, AI-driven hybrid methodology for the automatic synthesis of swarm robotic controllers for autonomous visual navigation. This approach synergistically combines multi-agent reinforcement learning with neuro-evolutionary strategies, specifically leveraging implementations of the cross-entropy method and the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy to optimize a pre-trained individual navigation policy. The underlying deep architecture is engineered for low-cost, resource-constrained platforms, utilizing a compact neural network that relies exclusively on monocular camera imagery. This vision-based design emphasizes computational and energy efficiency, a critical requirement for practical swarm deployments. Experiments, performed in a high-fidelity physics simulator, demonstrate that the resulting controllers enable robust and scalable collective exploration of diverse indoor environments. The controller trained using our cross-entropy method achieves superior exploration coverage, visiting 36.20% more regions compared to the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy. Critically, our best vision-based policy achieves exploration performance statistically comparable to traditional methods relying on more expensive distance sensors, while delivering a significant 31.40% average reduction in energy consumption. These findings validate an effective and economically viable autonomous control system, establishing a path for deploying highly efficient collective intelligence in real-world engineering applications.