Visual Swarm Navigation via Deep Reinforcement Learning and Evolutionary Hybrid Design

arXiv:2610.06400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Swarm robotics presents a robust and cost-effective paradigm for advanced automation in complex, dynamic environments, such as those encountered in search and rescue or environmental monitoring. A fundamental challenge for this field is the data-driven design of decentralized controllers capable of generating emergent collective behaviors. This paper proposes a novel, AI-driven hybrid methodology for the automatic synthesis of swarm robotic controllers for autonomous visual navigation. This approach synergistically combines multi-agent reinforcement learning with neuro-evolutionary strategies, specifically leveraging implementations of the cross-entropy method and the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy to optimize a pre-trained individual navigation policy. The underlying deep architecture is engineered for low-cost, resource-constrained platforms, utilizing a compact neural network that relies exclusively on monocular camera imagery. This vision-based design emphasizes computational and energy efficiency, a critical requirement for practical swarm deployments. Experiments, performed in a high-fidelity physics simulator, demonstrate that the resulting controllers enable robust and scalable collective exploration of diverse indoor environments. The controller trained using our cross-entropy method achieves superior exploration coverage, visiting 36.20% more regions compared to the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy. Critically, our best vision-based policy achieves exploration performance statistically comparable to traditional methods relying on more expensive distance sensors, while delivering a significant 31.40% average reduction in energy consumption. These findings validate an effective and economically viable autonomous control system, establishing a path for deploying highly efficient collective intelligence in real-world engineering applications.

Abstract:Swarm robotics presents a robust and cost-effective paradigm for advanced automation in complex, dynamic environments, such as those encountered in search and rescue or environmental monitoring. A fundamental challenge for this field is the data-driven design of decentralized controllers capable of generating emergent collective behaviors. This paper proposes a novel, AI-driven hybrid methodology for the automatic synthesis of swarm robotic controllers for autonomous visual navigation. This approach synergistically combines multi-agent reinforcement learning with neuro-evolutionary strategies, specifically leveraging implementations of the cross-entropy method and the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy to optimize a pre-trained individual navigation policy. The underlying deep architecture is engineered for low-cost, resource-constrained platforms, utilizing a compact neural network that relies exclusively on monocular camera imagery. This vision-based design emphasizes computational and energy efficiency, a critical requirement for practical swarm deployments. Experiments, performed in a high-fidelity physics simulator, demonstrate that the resulting controllers enable robust and scalable collective exploration of diverse indoor environments. The controller trained using our cross-entropy method achieves superior exploration coverage, visiting 36.20% more regions compared to the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy. Critically, our best vision-based policy achieves exploration performance statistically comparable to traditional methods relying on more expensive distance sensors, while delivering a significant 31.40% average reduction in energy consumption. These findings validate an effective and economically viable autonomous control system, establishing a path for deploying highly efficient collective intelligence in real-world engineering applications.

46 pages, 21 figures. Published in Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence under a CC BY 4.0 license

Robotics (cs.RO); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

I.2.9; I.2.11; I.2.6; I.2.8

arXiv:2610.06400 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.06400v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.06400 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 184, Part 1, 2026, 116325

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engappai.2026.116325 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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Visual Swarm Navigation via Deep Reinforcement Learning and Evolutionary Hybrid Design

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