Adaptive Role Learning With Evolutionary Multiagent Reinforcement Learning for UAV-Vehicle Collaboration in Sparse Mobile Crowdsensing

Sparse mobile crowdsensing is a cost-effective sensing paradigm that infers global data by sensing data from partial areas in a city. With the rapid development of diverse autonomous mobile agents, such as uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) and ground vehicles, they have been widely applied in sparse mobile crowdsensing. However, existing works often predefine the role structures and behavioral preferences of these agents in tasks, which significantly limits their flexibility and adaptability, and making it difficult to fully exploit the collaborative potential of crowdsensing agents to efficiently achieve high-quality data sensing. In this article, we propose an adaptive role learning framework for sparse mobile crowdsensing (ARL-SMCS), which focuses on role recognition for heterogeneous agents and role refinement among homogeneous agents. This framework, based on a multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) model, introduces a variational autoencoder to learn the latent role representations of agents and uses maximum mean discrepancy to distinguish the functionalities of different types of agents. Additionally, ARL-SMCS incorporates an evolutionary algorithm to further refine task preferences among homogeneous agents. This framework overcomes the limitations of static role assignment in adapting to dynamic environments and task conflicts during task execution, significantly improving sensing quality and resource utilization efficiency. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that ARL-SMCS consistently outperforms other baseline methods under various conditions, including different numbers, endurance, and decision interval lengths.