This paper investigates the multi-agent persistent monitoring problem via a novel distributed submodular receding horizon control approach. In order to approximate global monitoring performance, with the definition of sub-modularity, the original persistent monitoring objective is divided into several local objectives in a receding horizon framework, and the optimal trajectories of each agent are obtained by taking into account the neighborhood information. Specifically, the optimization horizon of each local objective is derived from the local target states and the information received from their neighboring agents. Based on the sub-modularity of each local objective, the distributed greedy algorithm is proposed. As a result, each agent coordinates with neighboring agents asynchronously and optimizes its trajectory independently, which reduces the computational complexity while achieving the global performance as much as possible. The conditions are established to ensure the estimation error converges to a bounded global performance. Finally, simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

With the increasing complexity of UAV application scenarios, the performance of a single UAV cannot meet the mission requirements. Many complex tasks need the cooperation of multiple UAVs. How to coordinate UAV resources becomes the key to mission completion. In this paper, a task model including multiple UAVs and unknown obstacles is constructed, and the model is transformed into a Markov decision process (MDP). In addition, considering the influence of strategies among UAVs, a multiagent reinforcement learning algorithm based on SAC algorithm and centralized training and decentralized execution framework, MA-SAC (Multi-Agent Soft Actor-Critic), is proposed to solve the MDP. Simulation results show that the algorithm can effectively deal with the task allocation problem of multiple UAVs in this scenario, and its performance is better than other multiagent reinforcement learning algorithms.

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