QuadSwarm: A Modular Multi-Quadrotor Simulator for Deep Reinforcement Learning with Direct Thrust Control

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in creating robust policies for robotics tasks. However, contemporary RL algorithms are data-hungry, often requiring billions of environment transitions to train successful policies. This necessitates the use of fast and highly-parallelizable simulators....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2023-06
Main Authors: Huang, Zhehui, Batra, Sumeet, Chen, Tao, Krupani, Rahul, Kumar, Tushar, Molchanov, Artem, Petrenko, Aleksei, Preiss, James A, Yang, Zhaojing, Sukhatme, Gaurav S
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Deep learning
Multiple robots
Policies
Robotics
Rotary wing aircraft
Simulation
Simulators
Thrust control
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Summary:Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in creating robust policies for robotics tasks. However, contemporary RL algorithms are data-hungry, often requiring billions of environment transitions to train successful policies. This necessitates the use of fast and highly-parallelizable simulators. In addition to speed, such simulators need to model the physics of the robots and their interaction with the environment to a level acceptable for transferring policies learned in simulation to reality. We present QuadSwarm, a fast, reliable simulator for research in single and multi-robot RL for quadrotors that addresses both issues. QuadSwarm, with fast forward-dynamics propagation decoupled from rendering, is designed to be highly parallelizable such that throughput scales linearly with additional compute. It provides multiple components tailored toward multi-robot RL, including diverse training scenarios, and provides domain randomization to facilitate the development and sim2real transfer of multi-quadrotor control policies. Initial experiments suggest that QuadSwarm achieves over 48,500 simulation samples per second (SPS) on a single quadrotor and over 62,000 SPS on eight quadrotors on a 16-core CPU. The code can be found in https://github.com/Zhehui-Huang/quad-swarm-rl.
ISSN:2331-8422