Collision-Free UAV Navigation with a Monocular Camera Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) with reduced sensing and communication capabilities can support potential use cases in different indoor environments such as automated factories or commercial buildings. In this context, we consider the problem of collision-free autonomous UAV navigation supported by a simple sensor. We propose a navigation system based on object detection and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) that only exploits sensing data obtained by a monocular camera mounted on the UAV. Object detection is incorporated into DRL training to reduce flight time and to maximize the probability of avoiding both current and future crashes. Moreover, object detection also helps to remove the impact of wrong predictions from the deep network. When compared to schemes using traditional RL methods, the proposed framework not only leads to collision- free trips, but it also reduces flying times towards given destinations by 25%, and cuts down 50% of unnecessary turns.