Reinforcement Learning-based Collision Avoidance for UAV

Abstract

One of the significant aspects for enabling the intelligent behavior to the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is by providing an algorithm for navigation through the dynamic and unseen environment. Therefore, to be autonomous, they need sensors to perceive their surroundings and utilize gathered information to decide which action to take. Having that in mind, in this paper, the authors designed the system for obstacle avoidance and also investigate the elements of the Markov decision process and their influence on each other. The flying mobile robot used within the considered problem is quadrotor type and has an integrated Lidar sensor which is utilized to detect obstacles. The sequential decision-making model based on Q-learning is trained within the MATLAB Simulink environment. The simulation results demonstrate that the UAV can navigate through the environment in most algorithm runs without colliding with surrounding obstacles.