Transformer-Based Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Robot Autonomous Exploration

A map of the environment is the basis for the robot’s navigation. Multi-robot collaborative autonomous exploration allows for rapidly constructing maps of unknown environments, essential for application areas such as search and rescue missions. Traditional autonomous exploration methods are inefficient due to the repetitive exploration problem. For this reason, we propose a multi-robot autonomous exploration method based on the Transformer model. Our multi-agent deep reinforcement learning method includes a multi-agent learning method to effectively improve exploration efficiency. We conducted experiments comparing our proposed method with existing methods in a simulation environment, and the experimental results showed that our proposed method had a good performance and a specific generalization ability.