UAV autonomous aerial combat maneuver strategy generation with observation error based on state-adversarial deep deterministic policy gradient and inverse reinforcement learning

With the development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and artificial intelligence (AI) technology, Intelligent UAV will be widely used in future autonomous aerial combat. Previous researches on autonomous aerial combat within visual range (WVR) have limitations due to simplifying assumptions, limited robustness, and ignoring sensor errors. In this paper, in order to consider the error of the aircraft sensors, we model the aerial combat WVR as a state-adversarial Markov decision process (SA-MDP), which introduce the small adversarial perturbations on state observations and these perturbations do not alter the environment directly, but can mislead the agent into making suboptimal decisions. Meanwhile, we propose a novel autonomous aerial combat maneuver strategy generation algorithm with high-performance and high-robustness based on state-adversarial deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm (SA-DDPG), which add a robustness regularizers related to an upper bound on performance loss at the actor-network. At the same time, a reward shaping method based on maximum entropy (MaxEnt) inverse reinforcement learning algorithm (IRL) is proposed to improve the aerial combat strategy generation algorithm’s efficiency. Finally, the efficiency of the aerial combat strategy generation algorithm and the performance and robustness of the resulting aerial combat strategy is verified by simulation experiments. Our main contributions are three-fold. First, to introduce the observation errors of UAV, we are modeling air combat as SA-MDP. Second, to make the strategy network of air combat maneuver more robust in the presence of observation errors, we introduce regularizers into the policy gradient. Third, to solve the problem that air combat’s reward function is too sparse, we use MaxEnt IRL to design a shaping reward to accelerate the convergence of SA-DDPG.