Multi-UAV Autonomous Path Planning in Reconnaissance Missions Considering Incomplete Information: A Reinforcement Learning Method

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are important in reconnaissance missions because of their flexibility and convenience. Vitally, UAVs are capable of autonomous navigation, which means they can be used to plan safe paths to target positions in dangerous surroundings. Traditional path-planning algorithms do not perform well when the environmental state is dynamic and partially observable. It is difficult for a UAV to make the correct decision with incomplete information. In this study, we proposed a multi-UAV path planning algorithm based on multi-agent reinforcement learning which entails the adoption of centralized training–decentralized execution architecture to coordinate all the UAVs. Additionally, we introduced a hidden state of the recurrent neural network to utilize the historical observation information. To solve the multi-objective optimization problem, We designed a joint reward function to guide UAVs to learn optimal policies under the multiple constraints. The results demonstrate that by using our method, we were able to solve the problem of incomplete information and low efficiency caused by partial observations and sparse rewards in reinforcement learning, and we realized kdiff multi-UAV cooperative autonomous path planning in unknown environment.