Avoidance Behavior of Small Mobile Robots based on the Successive Q-Learning

Q-learning is a recent reinforcement learning algorithm that does not need a modeling of environment and it is a suitable approach to learn behaviors for autonomous agents. But when it is applied to multi-agent learning with many I/O states, it is usually too complex and slow. To overcome this problem in the multi-agent learning system, we propose the successive Q-learning algorithm. Successive Q-learning algorithm divides state-action pairs, which agents can have, into several Q-functions, so it can reduce complexity and calculation amounts. This algorithm is suitable for multi-agent learning in a dynamically changing environment. The proposed successive Q-learning algorithm is applied to the prey-predator problem with the one-prey and two-predators, and its effectiveness is verified from the efficient avoidance ability of the prey agent.