A RDA-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for Autonomous Motion Planning of UAV in Dynamic Unknown Environments

Autonomous motion planning (AMP) in dynamic unknown environments emerges as an urgent requirement with the prosperity of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). In this paper, we present a DRL-based planning framework to address the AMP problem, which is applicable in both military and civilian fields. To maintain learning efficiency, a novel reward difference amplifying (RDA) scheme is proposed to reshape the conventional reward functions and is introduced into state-of-the-art DRLs to constructs novel DRL algorithms for the planner's learning. Different from conventional motion planning approaches, our DRL-based methods provide an end-to-end control for UAV, which directly maps the raw sensory measurements into high-level control signals. The training and testing experiments demonstrate that our RDA scheme makes great contributions to the performance improvement and provides the UAV good adaptability to dynamic environments.