Multi-UAV Formation Control with Static and Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance via Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Xie, Yuqing, Yu, Chao, Zang, Hongzhi, Gao, Feng, Tang, Wenhao, Huang, Jingyi, Chen, Jiayu, Xu, Botian, Wu, Yi, Wang, Yu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Xie, Yuqing
Yu, Chao
Zang, Hongzhi
Gao, Feng
Tang, Wenhao
Huang, Jingyi
Chen, Jiayu
Xu, Botian
Wu, Yi
Wang, Yu
author_facet Xie, Yuqing
Yu, Chao
Zang, Hongzhi
Gao, Feng
Tang, Wenhao
Huang, Jingyi
Chen, Jiayu
Xu, Botian
Wu, Yi
Wang, Yu
contents This paper tackles the challenging task of maintaining formation among multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) while avoiding both static and dynamic obstacles during directed flight. The complexity of the task arises from its multi-objective nature, the large exploration space, and the sim-to-real gap. To address these challenges, we propose a two-stage reinforcement learning (RL) pipeline. In the first stage, we randomly search for a reward function that balances key objectives: directed flight, obstacle avoidance, formation maintenance, and zero-shot policy deployment. The second stage applies this reward function to more complex scenarios and utilizes curriculum learning to accelerate policy training. Additionally, we incorporate an attention-based observation encoder to improve formation maintenance and adaptability to varying obstacle densities. Experimental results in both simulation and real-world environments demonstrate that our method outperforms both planning-based and RL-based baselines in terms of collision-free rates and formation maintenance across static, dynamic, and mixed obstacle scenarios. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of our curriculum learning strategy and attention-based encoder. Animated demonstrations are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/ uav-formation-with-avoidance/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_18495
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multi-UAV Formation Control with Static and Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance via Reinforcement Learning
Xie, Yuqing
Yu, Chao
Zang, Hongzhi
Gao, Feng
Tang, Wenhao
Huang, Jingyi
Chen, Jiayu
Xu, Botian
Wu, Yi
Wang, Yu
Robotics
This paper tackles the challenging task of maintaining formation among multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) while avoiding both static and dynamic obstacles during directed flight. The complexity of the task arises from its multi-objective nature, the large exploration space, and the sim-to-real gap. To address these challenges, we propose a two-stage reinforcement learning (RL) pipeline. In the first stage, we randomly search for a reward function that balances key objectives: directed flight, obstacle avoidance, formation maintenance, and zero-shot policy deployment. The second stage applies this reward function to more complex scenarios and utilizes curriculum learning to accelerate policy training. Additionally, we incorporate an attention-based observation encoder to improve formation maintenance and adaptability to varying obstacle densities. Experimental results in both simulation and real-world environments demonstrate that our method outperforms both planning-based and RL-based baselines in terms of collision-free rates and formation maintenance across static, dynamic, and mixed obstacle scenarios. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of our curriculum learning strategy and attention-based encoder. Animated demonstrations are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/ uav-formation-with-avoidance/.
title Multi-UAV Formation Control with Static and Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance via Reinforcement Learning
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18495