Decentralized Multi-Robot Navigation Coupled with Spatial-Temporal RetNet Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

Navigating robots through dynamic multi-robot environments, avoiding collisions with both other robots and obstacles, has emerged as a central challenge in robotics. The existing approaches fall short in allowing the policy network to effectively capture spatial-temporal reciprocal collision avoid- ance in multi-robot environments, comprising both static and dynamic obstacles, resulting in inadequate safety and efficiency in directing robot movement. In this study, we introduce a novel policy neural network called Spatial-Temporal RetNet (STR), designed to encode reciprocal collision avoidance states between robots in spatial and temporal dimensions. The goal is to improve the safety and efficacy of the policy neural network in directing robots to complete assigned tasks. The spatial state encoder module is built upon a parallel RetNet structure, which strengthens the neural network’s capacity in extracting reciprocal collision avoidance states between robots in spatial dimensions. This module addresses the limitations of position encoding in transformer-based multi-robot navigation policy neural networks. We design a temporal state encoder utilizing a recurrent RetNet structure. This innovation bolsters the multi-robot navigation policy neural network’s capability to capture features in the temporal dimension of multi-robot movements. It addresses the limitations of transformer-based multi-robot navigation policy neural networks, particularly in recurrently inferring information across time dimensions. Sim- ulation experiments were conducted to showcase the superior safety and effectiveness of our proposed method compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches in guiding robots to accomplish tasks.