Exploring the Generalizability of Geomagnetic Navigation: A Deep Reinforcement Learning approach with Policy Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Bai, Wenqi, Zhang, Shiliang, Zhang, Xiaohui, Ma, Xuehui, Yang, Songnan, Li, Yushuai, Huang, Tingwen
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Bai, Wenqi
Zhang, Shiliang
Zhang, Xiaohui
Ma, Xuehui
Yang, Songnan
Li, Yushuai
Huang, Tingwen
author_facet Bai, Wenqi
Zhang, Shiliang
Zhang, Xiaohui
Ma, Xuehui
Yang, Songnan
Li, Yushuai
Huang, Tingwen
contents The advancement in autonomous vehicles has empowered navigation and exploration in unknown environments. Geomagnetic navigation for autonomous vehicles has drawn increasing attention with its independence from GPS or inertial navigation devices. While geomagnetic navigation approaches have been extensively investigated, the generalizability of learned geomagnetic navigation strategies remains unexplored. The performance of a learned strategy can degrade outside of its source domain where the strategy is learned, due to a lack of knowledge about the geomagnetic characteristics in newly entered areas. This paper explores the generalization of learned geomagnetic navigation strategies via deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Particularly, we employ DRL agents to learn multiple teacher models from distributed domains that represent dispersed navigation strategies, and amalgamate the teacher models for generalizability across navigation areas. We design a reward shaping mechanism in training teacher models where we integrate both potential-based and intrinsic-motivated rewards. The designed reward shaping can enhance the exploration efficiency of the DRL agent and improve the representation of the teacher models. Upon the gained teacher models, we employ multi-teacher policy distillation to merge the policies learned by individual teachers, leading to a navigation strategy with generalizability across navigation domains. We conduct numerical simulations, and the results demonstrate an effective transfer of the learned DRL model from a source domain to new navigation areas. Compared to existing evolutionary-based geomagnetic navigation methods, our approach provides superior performance in terms of navigation length, duration, heading deviation, and success rate in cross-domain navigation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_05069
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring the Generalizability of Geomagnetic Navigation: A Deep Reinforcement Learning approach with Policy Distillation
Bai, Wenqi
Zhang, Shiliang
Zhang, Xiaohui
Ma, Xuehui
Yang, Songnan
Li, Yushuai
Huang, Tingwen
Robotics
The advancement in autonomous vehicles has empowered navigation and exploration in unknown environments. Geomagnetic navigation for autonomous vehicles has drawn increasing attention with its independence from GPS or inertial navigation devices. While geomagnetic navigation approaches have been extensively investigated, the generalizability of learned geomagnetic navigation strategies remains unexplored. The performance of a learned strategy can degrade outside of its source domain where the strategy is learned, due to a lack of knowledge about the geomagnetic characteristics in newly entered areas. This paper explores the generalization of learned geomagnetic navigation strategies via deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Particularly, we employ DRL agents to learn multiple teacher models from distributed domains that represent dispersed navigation strategies, and amalgamate the teacher models for generalizability across navigation areas. We design a reward shaping mechanism in training teacher models where we integrate both potential-based and intrinsic-motivated rewards. The designed reward shaping can enhance the exploration efficiency of the DRL agent and improve the representation of the teacher models. Upon the gained teacher models, we employ multi-teacher policy distillation to merge the policies learned by individual teachers, leading to a navigation strategy with generalizability across navigation domains. We conduct numerical simulations, and the results demonstrate an effective transfer of the learned DRL model from a source domain to new navigation areas. Compared to existing evolutionary-based geomagnetic navigation methods, our approach provides superior performance in terms of navigation length, duration, heading deviation, and success rate in cross-domain navigation.
title Exploring the Generalizability of Geomagnetic Navigation: A Deep Reinforcement Learning approach with Policy Distillation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05069