Decentralized Reinforcement Learning Applied to Mobile Robots

In this paper, decentralized reinforcement learning is applied to a control problem with a multidimensional action space. We propose a decentralized reinforcement learning architecture for a mobile robot, where the individual components of the commanded velocity vector are learned in parallel by separate agents. We empirically demonstrate that the decentralized architecture outperforms its centralized counterpart in terms of the learning time, while using less computational resources. The method is validated on two problems: an extended version of the 3dimensional mountain car, and a ball-pushing behavior performed with a differential-drive robot, which is also tested on a physical setup.