For this project I use the Unity ML-Agents Tennis Environment. In this environment, two agents control rackets to bounce a ball over a net. If an agent hits the ball over the net, it receives a reward of +0.1. If an agent lets a ball hit the ground or hits the ball out of bounds, it receives a reward of -0.01. Thus, the goal of each agent is to keep the ball in play.
The observation space consists of 8 variables corresponding to the position and velocity of the ball and racket. Each agent receives its own, local observation. Two continuous actions are available, corresponding to movement toward (or away from) the net, and jumping.
The task is episodic, and in order to solve the environment, your agents must get an average score of +0.5 (over 100 consecutive episodes, after taking the maximum over both agents). Specifically,
- After each episode, we add up the rewards that each agent received (without discounting), to get a score for each agent. This yields 2 (potentially different) scores. We then take the maximum of these 2 scores.
- This yields a single score for each episode. The environment is considered solved, when the average (over 100 episodes) of those scores is at least +0.5.
All of the needed files for this project are included in the above GitHub repository.
You don’t need to install Unity. This is because the environment is already built for you, and you can download it from one of the links below. You need only select the environment that matches your operating system:
- Linux: click here
- Mac OSX: click here
- Windows (32-bit): click here
- Windows (64-bit): click here Then, place the file in the p3_collab-compet/ folder in the DRLND GitHub repository, and unzip (or decompress) the file.
(For Windows users) Check out this link if you need help with determining if your computer is running a 32-bit version or 64-bit version of the Windows operating system.
(For AWS) If you'd like to train the agent on AWS (and have not enabled a virtual screen), then please use this link to obtain the "headless" version of the environment. You will not be able to watch the agent without enabling a virtual screen, but you will be able to train the agent. (To watch the agent, you should follow the instructions to enable a virtual screen, and then download the environment for the Linuxoperating system above.)
After you have followed the instructions above, open Multi_Agent_Project.ipynb (located in this GitHub repository) and follow the instructions to learn how to use the Python API to control the agent. Details on how to run the code in the GitHub repository, including how to train the agent, is described in the Jupyter Notebook file.