Keeping in Touch with Collaborative UAVs: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Effective collaborations among autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) rely on timely information sharing. However, the time-varying flight environment and the intermittent link connectivity pose great challenges to message delivery. In this paper, we leverage the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) technique to address the UAVs' optimal links discovery and selection problem in uncertain environments. As the multi-agent learning efficiency is constrained by the high-dimensional and continuous action spaces, we slice the whole action spaces into a number of tractable fractions to achieve efficient convergences of optimal policies in continuous domains. Moreover, for the nonstationarity issue that particularly challenges the multi-agent DRL with local perceptions, we present a multi-agent mutual sampling method that jointly interacts the intra-agent and inter-agent state-action information to stabilize and expedite the training procedure. We evaluate the proposed algorithm on the UAVs' continuous network connection task. Results show that the associated UAVs can quickly select the optimal connected links, which facilitate the UAVs' teamwork significantly.