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TERL: Large-Scale Multi-Target Encirclement Using Transformer-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning

Robotics 2025-08-28 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

Pursuit-evasion (PE) problem is a critical challenge in multi-robot systems (MRS). While reinforcement learning (RL) has shown its promise in addressing PE tasks, research has primarily focused on single-target pursuit, with limited exploration of multi-target encirclement, particularly in large-scale settings. This paper proposes a Transformer-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning (TERL) framework for large-scale multi-target encirclement. By integrating a transformer-based policy network with target selection, TERL enables robots to adaptively prioritize targets and safely coordinate robots. Results show that TERL outperforms existing RL-based methods in terms of encirclement success rate and task completion time, while maintaining good performance in large-scale scenarios. Notably, TERL, trained on small-scale scenarios (15 pursuers, 4 targets), generalizes effectively to large-scale settings (80 pursuers, 20 targets) without retraining, achieving a 100% success rate. The code and demonstration video are available at https://github.com/ApricityZ/TERL.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.12395,
  title  = {TERL: Large-Scale Multi-Target Encirclement Using Transformer-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Heng Zhang and Guoxiang Zhao and Xiaoqiang Ren},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.12395},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted to the 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2025)

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:22:25.672Z