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arXiv · 2512.18596

EIA-SEC: Improved Actor-Critic Framework for Multi-UAV Collaborative Control in Smart Agriculture

Quanxi Zhou·Wencan Mao·Yilei Liang·Manabu Tsukada·Yunling Liu·Jon Crowcroft
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Abstract

The widespread application of wireless communication technology has promoted the development of smart agriculture, where unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play a multifunctional role. We target a multi-UAV smart agriculture system where UAVs cooperatively perform data collection, image acquisition, and communication tasks. In this context, we model a Markov decision process to solve the multi-UAV trajectory planning problem. Moreover, we propose a novel Elite Imitation Actor-Shared Ensemble Critic (EIA-SEC) framework, where agents adaptively learn from the elite agent to reduce trial-and-error costs, and a shared ensemble critic collaborates with each agent's local critic to ensure unbiased objective value estimates and prevent overestimation. Experimental results demonstrate that EIA-SEC outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of reward performance, training stability, and convergence speed.

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Quanxi Zhou, Wencan Mao, Yilei Liang, Manabu Tsukada, Yunling Liu, Jon Crowcroft. 2025-12-21. EIA-SEC: Improved Actor-Critic Framework for Multi-UAV Collaborative Control in Smart Agriculture. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18596

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