A Framework of Hyper-Heuristics based on Q-Learning

in International Conference in Optimization and Learning (OLA2022) (2022)

Learning to Optimise a Swarm of UAVs

in Applied Sciences (2022), 12(19 9587),

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has shown a drastic increase in interest in the past few years. Current applications mainly depend on single UAV operations, which face critical limitations such ... [more ▼]

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has shown a drastic increase in interest in the past few years. Current applications mainly depend on single UAV operations, which face critical limitations such as mission range or resilience. Using several autonomous UAVs as a swarm is a promising approach to overcome these. However, designing an efficient swarm is a challenging task, since its global behaviour emerges solely from local decisions and interactions. These properties make classical multirobot design techniques not applicable, while evolutionary swarm robotics is typically limited to a single use case. This work, thus, proposes an automated swarming algorithm design approach, and more precisely, a generative hyper-heuristic relying on multi-objective reinforcement learning, that permits us to obtain not only efficient but also reusable swarming behaviours. Experimental results on a three-objective variant of the Coverage of a Connected UAV Swarm problem demonstrate that it not only permits one to generate swarming heuristics that outperform the state-of-the-art in terms of coverage by a swarm of UAVs but also provides high stability. Indeed, it is empirically demonstrated that the model trained on a certain class of instances generates heuristics and is capable of performing well on instances with a different size or swarm density. [less ▲]

Automating the Design of Efficient Distributed Behaviours for a Swarm of UAVs

in IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence, Canberra 1-4 December 2020 (2020, December)

The usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is gradually gaining momentum for commercial applications. The vast majority considers a single UAV, which comes with several constraints such as its range of ... [more ▼]

The usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is gradually gaining momentum for commercial applications. The vast majority considers a single UAV, which comes with several constraints such as its range of operations or the number of sensors it can carry. Using multiple autonomous UAVs simultaneously as a swarm makes it possible to overcome these limitations. However, manually designing complex emerging behaviours like swarming is a difficult and tedious task especially for such distributed systems which performance is hardly predictable. This article therefore proposes to automate the design of UAV swarming behaviours by defining a multi-objective optimisation problem, so called Coverage of a Connected-UAV Swarm (CCUS), and designing a Q-Learning based Hyper-Heuristic (QLHH) for generating distributed CCUS heuristics. Experimental results demonstrate the capacity of QLHH to generate efficient heuristics for any instance from a given class. [less ▲]

Automated design of efficient swarming behaviours: a Q-learning hyper-heuristic approach

in GECCO '20: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Companion Volume, Cancún, Mexico, July 8-12, 2020 (2020)

GP hyper-heuristic for the travelling salesman problem

Scientific Conference (2019, January 29)