Heterogeneous Policy Networks for Composite Robot Team Communication and Coordination

High-performing human-human teams learn intelligent and efficient communication and coordination strategies to maximize their joint utility. These teams implicitly understand the different roles of heterogeneous team members and adapt their communication protocols accordingly. Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has attempted to develop computational methods for synthesizing such joint coordination-communication strategies, but emulating heterogeneous communication patterns across agents with different state, action, and observation spaces has remained a challenge. Without properly modeling agent heterogeneity, as in prior MARL work that leverages homogeneous graph networks, communication becomes less helpful and can even deteriorate the team's performance. In the past, we proposed Heterogeneous Policy Networks (HetNet) to learn efficient and diverse communication models for coordinating cooperative heterogeneous teams. In this extended work, we extend Heterogeneous Policy Networks (HetNet) to support scaling heterogeneous robot teams. Building on heterogeneous graph-attention networks, we show that HetNet not only facilitates learning heterogeneous collaborative policies but also enables end-to-end training for learning highly efficient binarized messaging. Our empirical evaluation shows that HetNet sets a new state of the art in learning coordination and communication strategies for heterogeneous multi-agent teams by achieving an 5.84% to 707.65% performance improvement over the next-best baseline across multiple domains while simultaneously achieving a 200× reduction in the required communication bandwidth.