In this paper, we consider the problem of providing robustness to adversarial communication in multi-agent systems. Specifically, we propose a solution towards robust cooperation, which enables the multi-agent system to maintain high performance in the presence of anonymous non-cooperative agents that communicate faulty, misleading or manipulative information. In pursuit of this goal, we propose a communication architecture based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which is amenable to a novel Gaussian Process (GP)-based probabilistic model characterizing the mutual information between the simultaneous communications of different agents due to their physical proximity and relative position. This model allows agents to locally compute approximate posterior probabilities, or confidences, that any given one of their communication partners is being truthful. These confidences can be used as weights in a message filtering scheme, thereby suppressing the influence of suspicious communication on the receiving agent's decisions. In order to assess the efficacy of our method, we introduce a taxonomy of non-cooperative agents, which distinguishes them by the amount of information available to them. We demonstrate in two distinct experiments that our method performs well across this taxonomy, outperforming alternative methods. For all but the best informed adversaries, our filtering method is able to reduce the impact that noncooperative agents cause, reducing it to the point of negligibility, and with negligible cost to performance in the absence of adversaries.
Many multi-robot planning problems are burdened by the curse of dimensionality, which compounds the difficulty of applying solutions to large-scale problem instances. The use of learning-based methods in multi-robot planning holds great promise as it enables us to offload the online computational burden of expensive, yet optimal solvers, to an offline learning procedure. Simply put, the idea is to train a policy to copy an optimal pattern generated by a small-scale system, and then transfer that policy to much larger systems, in the hope that the learned strategy scales, while maintaining near-optimal performance. Yet, a number of issues impede us from leveraging this idea to its full potential. This blue-sky paper elaborates some of the key challenges that remain.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a paradigmshifting neural architecture to facilitate the learning of complex multi-agent behaviors. Recent work has demonstrated remarkable performance in tasks such as flocking, multi-agent path planning and cooperative coverage. However, the policies derived through GNN-based learning schemes have not yet been deployed to the real-world on physical multi-robot systems. In this work, we present the design of a system that allows for fully decentralized execution of GNN-based policies. We create a framework based on ROS2 and elaborate its details in this paper. We demonstrate our framework on a case-study that requires tight coordination between robots, and present firstof-a-kind results that show successful real-world deployment of GNN-based policies on a decentralized multi-robot system relying on Adhoc communication. A video demonstration of this case-study can be found online 1 .
Deep learning approaches have become the standard solution to many problems in computer vision and robotics, but obtaining proper and sufficient training data is often a problem, as human labor is often error prone, time consuming and expensive. Solutions based on simulation have become more popular in recent years, but the gap between simulation and reality is still a major issue. In this paper, we introduce a novel model for augmenting synthetic image data through unsupervised image-to-image translation by applying the style of real world images to simulated images with open source frameworks. This model intends to generate the training data as a separate step and not as part of the training. The generated dataset is combined with conventional augmentation methods and is then applied to a neural network capable of running in real-time on autonomous soccer robots. Our evaluation shows a significant improvement compared to networks trained on simulated images without this kind of augmentation.
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