Automated Enemy Avoidance of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Based on Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

This paper focuses on one of the collision avoidance scenarios for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), where the UAV needs to avoid collision with the enemy UAV during its flying path to the goal point. Such a type of problem is defined as the enemy avoidance problem in this paper. To deal with this problem, a learning based framework is proposed. Under this framework, the enemy avoidance problem is formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), and the maneuver policies for the UAV are learned based on a temporal-difference reinforcement learning method called Sarsa. To handle the enemy avoidance problem in continuous state space, the Cerebellar Model Arithmetic Computer (CMAC) function approximation technique is embodied in the proposed framework. Furthermore, a hardware-in-the-loop (HITL) simulation environment is established. Simulation results show that the UAV agent can learn a satisfying policy under the proposed framework. Comparing with the random policy and the fixed-rule policy, the learned policy can achieve a far higher possibility in reaching the goal point without colliding with the enemy UAV.