<p><span style="color: rgb(48, 49, 51); font-family: " helvetica="" pingfang="" hiragino="" sans="" microsoft="" font-size:="" text-wrap-mode:="" background-color:="">Improving Multi-Robot Cooperative Navigation Through Bio-Inspired Reinf
<p>Multi-robot cooperative navigation in dynamic environments presents vital challenges in coordination, safety, and scalability that existing approaches have not effectively addressed. This paper presents a novel bio-inspired reinforcement learning (BIRL) model that enables distributed decision-making through local sensing and adaptive behavioral primitives derived from natural swarm systems. The method integrates alignment, cohesion, separation, and pheromone-based communication mechanisms within a distributed actor-critic architecture that learns adaptive policies while maintaining natural coordination patterns. The mathematical background formulates cooperative navigation as a multi-objective optimization problem encompassing collision avoidance, goal convergence, path efficiency, and energy conservation. Bio-inspired behavioral primitives operate exclusively on local data without requiring centralized coordination, while sensor fusion combines multi-modal measurements through Extended Kalman Filtering with attention mechanisms that adapt based on behavioral context. Comprehensive experimental validation demonstrates substantial performance advantages over established baseline methods. The proposed method achieves a 96.2% mission success rate (SR) with a 0.8% collision rate (CR), representing a 14.7% improvement in SR and a 75% reduction in CR compared to the best baseline method. Scalability assessment confirms graceful performance degradation across team sizes from 2 to 12 robots, maintaining 80 Hz control frequencies. Robustness evaluation demonstrates exceptional resilience to sensor noise (12.1% performance degradation under 20% noise), communication failures (81.7% SR with 30% PLR), and robot failures (91.7% formation recovery rate). Ablation studies validate the critical contributions of bio-inspired components, with complete removal reducing SR to 74.6% and requiring 77% more training episodes.</p>
Authors
- Firas Tayseer Ayasrah (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6477-000X)
- Sudhakar Sengan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4901-1432)
- Maaruf Ali (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9906-5004)
- D. Menaga
- G. Sivakumar
- Aseel Smerat (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-4600-509X)
- Umidbek Abdalov
Publication Details
- Published
- 2025-09-26
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.20517/scierxiv202509.0632.v1
- Primary Topic
- Water Quality Monitoring Technologies
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00