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Coordinated defensive escorts can aid a navigating payload by positioning themselves strategically in order to maintain the safety of the payload from obstacles. In this letter, we present a novel, end-to-end solution for coordinating an escort team for protecting high-value payloads in a space crowded with interacting obstacles. Our solution employs deep reinforcement learning in order to train a team of escorts to maintain payload safety while navigating alongside the payload. The escorts utilize a trained centralized policy in a distributed fashion (i.e., no explicit communication between the escorts), relying only on range-limited positional information of the environment. Given this observation, escorts automatically prioritize obstacles to intercept and determine where to intercept them, using their repulsive interaction force to actively manipulate the environment. When compared to a payload navigating with a state-of …