NeuronsMAE: A Novel Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Environment for Cooperative and Competitive Multi-Robot Tasks

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has achieved remarkable success in various challenging problems. Meanwhile, more and more benchmarks have emerged and provided some standards to evaluate the algorithms in different fields. On the one hand, the virtual MARL environments lack knowledge of real-world tasks and actuator abilities, and on the other hand, the current task-specified multi-robot platform has poor support for the generality of multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms and lacks support for transferring from simulation to the real environment. Bridging the gap between the virtual MARL environments and the real multi-robot platform becomes the key to promoting the practicability of MARL algorithms. This paper proposes a novel MARL environment for real multi-robot tasks named NeuronsMAE (Neurons Multi-Agent Environment). This environment supports cooperative and competitive multi-robot tasks and is configured with rich parameter interfaces to study the multi-agent policy transfer from simulation to reality. With this platform, we evaluate various popular MARL algorithms and build a new MARL benchmark for multi-robot tasks. We hope that this platform will facilitate the research and application of MARL algorithms for real robot tasks. Information about the benchmark and the open-source code will be released.