Online Planning for Multi-UAV Pursuit-Evasion in Unknown Environments Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Multi-UAV pursuit-evasion, where pursuers aim to capture evaders, poses a key challenge for UAV swarm intelligence. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has demonstrated potential in modeling cooperative behaviors, but most RL-based approaches remain constrained to simplified simulations with limited dynamics or fixed scenarios. Previous attempts to deploy RL policy to real-world pursuit-evasion are largely restricted to two-dimensional scenarios, such as ground vehicles or UAVs at fixed altitudes. In this paper, we address multi-UAV pursuit-evasion by considering UAV dynamics and physical constraints. We introduce an evader prediction-enhanced network to tackle partial observability in cooperative strategy learning. Additionally, we propose an adaptive environment generator within MARL training, enabling higher exploration efficiency and better policy generalization across diverse scenarios. Simulations show our method significantly outperforms all baselines in challenging scenarios, generalizing to unseen scenarios with a 100% capture rate. Finally, we derive a feasible policy via a two-stage reward refinement and deploy the policy on real quadrotors in a zero-shot manner. To our knowledge, this is the first work to derive and deploy an RL-based policy using collective thrust and body rates control commands for multi-UAV pursuit-evasion in unknown environments. The open-source code and videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/pursuit-evasion-rl.