A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Multi-Robot Planar Construction
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We consider the problem of shape formation in a decentralized swarm of robots trained with reinforcement learning. Shapes are formed from ambient objects which are pushed into a desired pattern. The shape is specified using a projected scalar field that the robots can locally sample. This scalar field plays a similar role to the pheromone gradients used by social insects such as ants and termites to guide the construction of their sophisticated nests. The overall approach is inspired by our previously developed orbital construction algorithm. In this paper, we use reinforcement learning to automatically learn policies that accomplish shape formation without the need for hand-coding algorithmic solutions for each desired shape. The particular research questions addressed in this paper are as follows: (1) The performance of learned policies versus the original hard-coded orbital construction algorithm; (2) The performance of the system on more shapes than were considered for the original algorithm. (3) The impact of the number of robots used in training and then subsequently in testing; We provide experimental results using a custom two-dimensional physics simulator of an environment containing circular robots and objects.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it