Efficient Multi-Agent Exploration in Area Coverage Under Spatial and Resource Constraints

Maram Hasan, Rajdeep Niyogi

2025

Abstract

Efficient exploration in multi-agent Coverage Path Planning (CPP) is challenging due to spatial, resource, and communication constraints. Traditional reinforcement learning methods often struggle with agent coordination and effective policy learning in such constrained environments. This paper presents a novel end-to-end multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework for area coverage tasks, leveraging the centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) paradigm with enriched tensor-based observations and curiosity-based intrinsic rewards, which encourage agents to explore under-visited regions, enhancing coverage efficiency and learning performance. Additionally, prioritized experience adaptation accelerates convergence by focusing on the most informative experiences, improving policy robustness. By integrating these components, the proposed framework facilitates adaptive exploration while adhering to the spatial, resource, and operational constraints inherent in CPP tasks. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance over traditional approaches in coverage tasks under variable configurations.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Hasan M. and Niyogi R. (2025). Efficient Multi-Agent Exploration in Area Coverage Under Spatial and Resource Constraints. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 3: ICAART; ISBN 978-989-758-737-5, SciTePress, pages 1278-1287. DOI: 10.5220/0013321600003890

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart25,
author={Maram Hasan and Rajdeep Niyogi},
title={Efficient Multi-Agent Exploration in Area Coverage Under Spatial and Resource Constraints},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 3: ICAART},
year={2025},
pages={1278-1287},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013321600003890},
isbn={978-989-758-737-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 3: ICAART
TI - Efficient Multi-Agent Exploration in Area Coverage Under Spatial and Resource Constraints
SN - 978-989-758-737-5
AU - Hasan M.
AU - Niyogi R.
PY - 2025
SP - 1278
EP - 1287
DO - 10.5220/0013321600003890
PB - SciTePress