  Multi-agent control problems constitute an interesting area of application
for deep reinforcement learning models with continuous action spaces. Such
real-world applications, however, typically come with critical safety
constraints that must not be violated. In order to ensure safety, we enhance
the well-known multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG)
framework by adding a safety layer to the deep policy network. In particular,
we extend the idea of linearizing the single-step transition dynamics, as was
done for single-agent systems in Safe DDPG (Dalal et al., 2018), to multi-agent
settings. We additionally propose to circumvent infeasibility problems in the
action correction step using soft constraints (Kerrigan & Maciejowski, 2000).
Results from the theory of exact penalty functions can be used to guarantee
constraint satisfaction of the soft constraints under mild assumptions. We
empirically find that the soft formulation achieves a dramatic decrease in
constraint violations, making safety available even during the learning
procedure.

Machine Learning;Robotics