[2512.09682] Dynamic one-time delivery of critical data by small and sparse UAV swarms: a model problem for MARL scaling studies

Electrical Engineering and Systems Science > Systems and Control arXiv:2512.09682 (eess) [Submitted on 10 Dec 2025 (v1), last revised 8 May 2026 (this version, v2)] Title:Dynamic one-time delivery of critical data by small and sparse UAV swarms: a model problem for MARL scaling studies Authors:Mika Persson, Jonas Lidman, Jacob Ljungberg, Samuel Sandelius, Adam Andersson View a PDF of the paper titled Dynamic one-time delivery of critical data by small and sparse UAV swarms: a model problem for MARL scaling studies, by Mika Persson and 4 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:This work studies the application of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) to decentralized control of unmanned aerial vehicles to relay a critical data package to a known position. For this purpose, a family of deterministic games is introduced, designed for MARL scaling studies. A robust baseline policy is proposed which restricts agent motion and applies Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm. Computational experiment results show that two off-the-shelf MARL algorithms perform competitively with the baseline for a small number of agents, but face scalability issues as the number of agents increases. Source code and animations are available online at this https URL. Comments: Subjects: Systems and Control (eess.SY); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) Cite as: arXiv:2512.09682 [eess.SY]   (or arXiv:2512.09682v2 [eess.SY] f...