Learning Safe Multi-agent Control with Decentralized Neural Barrier Certificates
Authors: Zengyi Qin, Kaiqing Zhang, Yuxiao Chen, Jingkai Chen, Chuchu Fan
Venue: ICLR 2021 Poster
Keywords: Multi-agent, safe, control barrier function, reinforcement learning
Abstract: We study the multi-agent safe control problem where agents should avoid collisions to static obstacles and collisions with each other while reaching their goals. Our core idea is to learn the multi-agent control policy jointly with  learning the control barrier functions as safety certificates. We propose a new joint-learning framework that can be implemented in a decentralized fashion, which can adapt to an arbitrarily large number of agents. Building upon this framework, we further improve the scalability by  incorporating neural network architectures  that are invariant to the quantity and permutation of neighboring agents. In addition, we propose a new spontaneous policy refinement method to further enforce the certificate condition during testing. We provide extensive experiments to demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms other leading multi-agent control approaches in terms of maintaining safety and completing original tasks. Our approach also shows substantial generalization capability in that the control policy can be trained with 8 agents in one scenario, while being used on other scenarios with up to 1024 agents in complex multi-agent environments and dynamics. Videos and source code can be found at https://realm.mit.edu/blog/learning-safe-multi-agent-control-decentralized-neural-barrier-certificates.