Emergent Cooperative Strategies for Multi-Agent Shepherding via Reinforcement Learning

2024/11/08 by Italo Napolitano, Andrea Lama, Napolitano, Italo +5 · 2 citations
Engineering · #Evacuation and Crowd Dynamics #FOS: Electrical engineering #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #electronic engineering #information engineering

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2411.05454

openalex publication_date 2024/11/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/03

Abstract

We present a decentralized reinforcement learning (RL) approach to address the multi-agent shepherding control problem, departing from the conventional assumption of cohesive target groups. Our two-layer control architecture consists of a low-level controller that guides each herder to contain a specific target within a goal region, while a high-level layer dynamically selects from multiple targets the one an herder should aim at corralling and containing. Cooperation emerges naturally, as herders autonomously choose distinct targets to expedite task completion. We further extend this approach to large-scale systems, where each herder applies a shared policy, trained with few agents, while managing a fixed subset of agents.

Cited by

• Decentralized Shepherding of Non-Cohesive Swarms Through Cluttered Environments via Deep Reinforcement Learning
• Hierarchical Learning-Based Control for Multi-Agent Shepherding of Stochastic Autonomous Agents

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