Jun 1, 2026 · cs.ROJ/K move · Enter open · S save
Youssef Mahran, Zeyad Gamal, Aamir Ahmad, Ayman El-Badawy
Mechatronics Engineering Department, German University in Cairo (GUC), Egypt · Institute of Flight Mechanics and Control (IFR), Head of Flight Robotics, University of Stuttgart, Germany · Faculty of EMS, Head of Mechatronics Engineering Department, German University in Cairo (GUC), Egypt
This paper proposes a Network Distributed Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (ND-MARL) framework for quadcopter consensus control. Compared to conventional multi-agent MARL formulations that rely on centralized planning or fully decentralized execution, ND-MARL incorporates the swarm communication graph into the decision process. Under a 2-Neighbor communication topology, each agent observes information of only two neighbors and outputs an action through a distributed policy. A high-level distributed consensus planner is trained using Multi-Agent Soft Actor-Critic (MASAC) and embedded in a hierarchical stack to generate reference target positions tracked by a low-level quadcopter controller. Results demonstrate smooth consensus trajectories and planner-tracker integration when compared to a centralized MARL controller. Most notably, the learned controller exhibits zero-shot scalability, as policies trained on a three-agent system are deployed to swarms of up to 250 agents under the same 2-Neighbor communication topology without retraining or fine-tuning, achieving consistent convergence with increasing steady-state spread at large team sizes due to sparse information propagation. These findings highlight ND-MARL as a stable framework for distributed, communication-aware quadcopter consensus control.