Perspective Projection Approach to a Faster UAV Navigation and Obstacle Avoidance Learning

Interest in research of the navigation problem for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is on the rise. The aim of such a task is reaching a goal position while avoiding obstacles on the way. In this paper, we propose a different approach to Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) of navigation decision making process by introducing the reward function based of Artificial Potential Fields (APF). The validation of the proposed approach is performed by the comparison to the state-of-the-art approach. In terms of training performance, success rate, memory usage and the inference time, our approach, though sparser in terms of perceived information about the environment, yield better results.