On Autonomous Drone Navigation Using Deep Learning and an Intelligent Rainbow DQN Agent

Abstract

Drones are intelligent devices that offer solutions for a continuously expanding variety of applications. Therefore, there would be a significant improvement if these systems could explore space automatically and without human-supervision. This work integrates cutting-edge artificial intelligence techniques that allow drones to travel independently. Following an overview of reinforcement learning methods built for discrete action space settings, a multilayer Perceptron model is constructed for feature extraction along with Hybrid neural networks. The agent employed in the experiments is a Rainbow DQN agent trained on the AirSim simulator. The experimental results are encouraging as the agent was tested for 16 missions and the accuracy was higher than 93%. In particular, the success for action selection was 97% and 93 for mission success. Finally, future work related to the navigation of autonomous drones is discussed including current concepts and methods of integration with more sophisticated algorithmic approaches.