Deep reinforcement learning approach with multiple experience pools for UAV’s autonomous motion planning in complex unknown environments

Autonomous motion planning (AMP) of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is aimed at enabling a UAV to safely fly to the target without human intervention. Recently, several emerging deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods have been employed to address the AMP problem in some simplified environments, and these methods have yielded good results. This paper proposes a multiple experience pools (MEPs) framework leveraging human expert experiences for DRL to speed up the learning process. Based on the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm, a MEP–DDPG algorithm was designed using model predictive control and simulated annealing to generate expert experiences. On applying this algorithm to a complex unknown simulation environment constructed based on the parameters of the real UAV, the training experiment results showed that the novel DRL algorithm resulted in a performance improvement exceeding 20% as compared with the state-of-the-art DDPG. The results of the experimental testing indicate that UAVs trained using MEP–DDPG can stably complete a variety of tasks in complex, unknown environments.