Efficient 2D Simulators for Deep-Reinforcement-Learning-based Training of Navigation Approaches

In recent years, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as a competitive approach for mobile robot navigation. However, training DRL agents often comes at the cost of difficult and tedious training procedures in which powerful hardware is required to conduct oftentimes long training runs. Especially, for complex environments, this proves to be a major bottleneck for widespread adoption of DRL approaches into industries. In this paper we integrate an efficient 2D simulator into the Arena-Rosnav framework of our previous work as an alternative simulation platform to train and develop DRL agents. Therefore, we utilized the provided API to integrate necessary components into the ecosystem of Arena-Rosnav. We evaluated our simulator by training a DRL agent within that platform and compared the training and navigational performance against the baseline 2D simulator Flatland, which is the default simulating platform of Arena-Rosnav. Results demonstrate that using our Arena2D simulator results in substantially faster training times and in some scenarios better agents. This proves to be an important step towards resource-efficient DRL training, which accelerates training times and improve the development cycle of DRL agents for navigation tasks. We made our simulator openly available at https://github.com/Arena-Rosnav/arena2d.