Underwater Equipotential Line Tracking Based on Self-Attention Embedded Multiagent Reinforcement Learning Toward AUV-Based ITS

The rapid development of intelligent underwater devices promotes marine exploitation activities, including marine resource exploitation, marine target tracking, etc. This work will present how to utilize the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) swarm or multi-AUVs system to track the underwater diffusion pollution, especially the equipotential line of particular concentration. Different from most of the current research, in this work, we take the AUV swam as a network system and utilize the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technique to optimize the network architecture, constructing an SDN-enabled AUV network Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). With the centralized management ability of the SDN technique, we propose the software-defined Centralized Training Decentralized Execution (CTDE) architecture based on the graph-based Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm to optimize the system control and management. To improve the computing and training efficiency, we embed the self-attention mechanism into the critic network construction, leading to a self-attention-based SAC algorithm. Evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed approach is able to exactly track the equipotential lines of a particular concentration in many categories (with different types of equipotential lines (including the shape, noise, and diffusion value)) of underwater diffusion fields. Meanwhile, our proposed approaches outperform some classical schemes in system awards, tracking errors, etc.