Autonomous UAV Navigation via Deep Reinforcement Learning Using PPO

In this paper, a computer vision-based navigation system is proposed for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The proposed navigation system is based on a deep reinforcement learning-based high-level controller. In this paper, proximal policy optimization (PPO), which is a deep reinforcement learning method, is used to train the artificial neural net-work in an end-to-end way using a continuous reward function. The proposed method has been tested on images obtained from different modalities (RGB and depth) in simulation environments that are created using Unreal Engine and Microsoft AirSim. For the navigation problem that this work is concerned with, a success rate of 96% has been obtained by using RGB cameras. Since RGB cameras are lighter than depth cameras and the trained artificial neural network has a parameter number less than 170.000, the proposed method is suitable to be deployed in micro aerial vehicles. Code is publicly available*.