Daily Arxiv

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Autonomous UAV Flight Navigation in Confined Spaces: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

Created by
  • Haebom

Author

Marco S. Tayar, Lucas K. de Oliveira, Felipe Andrade G. Tommaselli, Juliano D. Negri, Thiago H. Segreto, Ricardo V. Godoy, Marcelo Becker

Outline

Inspecting enclosed industrial infrastructure, such as ventilation ducts, requires robust collision-tolerant navigation policies for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This paper investigates the trade-offs between on-policy and off-policy algorithms for safety-critical, high-precision navigation tasks. Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) were compared to learn to perform precision flight in procedurally generated ducts within a simulator. While PPO consistently learned stable, collision-free policies to complete the entire process, SAC failed to find a complete solution, converging to a suboptimal policy that explored only the initial segments before failing.

Takeaways, Limitations

Takeaways:
For high-precision, safety-critical navigation tasks, the stable convergence of well-established on-policy methods is more important than the sample efficiency of off-policy algorithms.
PPO has successfully learned stable policies in complex environments.
Limitations:
Further analysis is needed to determine why SAC failed.
Comparative studies between different on-policy and off-policy algorithms are needed.
Verification in a real-world environment is required.
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