MARL-Based AUV Formation for Underwater Intelligent Autonomous Transport Systems Supported by 6G Network
Jingyi He, Meng Xi, Jiabao Wen, Shuai Xiao, Jiachen Yang
Abstract
With the advancement of communication technology from 5G to 6G, future communication networks will no longer be limited to land and air, and the ocean will also become the battlefield for 6G networks. The expansion of the network has expanded the scope of Intelligent Autonomous Transport Systems (IATS). As a new type of underwater transport system, Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) has gained popularity due to their advantages of autonomy, endurance, and concealment. In practical applications, it is necessary to fully consider the impact of uncertain marine environments on AUV’s motion, and also design stable control unit to achieve AUV formation. The core of the control unit is the AUV formation control algorithm, which should enable AUV to complete path planning and obstacle avoidance while ensuring formation control. In order to solve the above problems, an Intelligent Multi-agent path planning and formation control algorithm based on Value-decomposition networks (IMV) is proposed in this paper. Specifically, a three-dimensional high-resolution marine simulation environment located in the Mariana Trench is established, the state transition function and reward function are well designed under uncertain conditions for stable Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) mechanism, a Value-Decomposition Networks (VDN) based training framework is constructed to improve the convergence speed of the proposed method. The experimental results verify the excellent performance of the IMV method proposed in this paper, demonstrating that our method can outperform other methods in the aspect of stability, adaptability, intelligence, and timeliness.