Energy Efficiency Deep Reinforcement Learning for URLLC in 5G Mission-Critical Swarm Robotics

5G network provides high-rate, ultra-low latency, and high-reliability connections in support of wireless mobile robots with increased agility for factory automation. In this paper, we address the problem of swarm robotics control for mission-critical robotic applications in an automated grid-based warehouse scenario. Our goal is to maximize long-term energy efficiency while meeting the energy consumption constraint of the robots and the ultra-reliable and low latency communication (URLLC) requirements between the central controller and the swarm robotics. The problem of swarm robotics control in the URLLC regime is formulated as a nonconvex optimization problem since the achievable rate and decoding error probability with short blocklength are neither convex nor concave in bandwidth and transmit power. We propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based approach that employs the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) method and convolutional neural network (CNN) to achieve a stationary optimal control policy that consists of a number of continuous and discrete actions. Numerical results show that our proposed multi-agent DDPG algorithm outperforms the baselines in terms of decoding error probability and energy efficiency.