Reinforcement learning (RL) has been shown to be effective in path planning. However, it usually requires exploring a sufficient number of state–action pairs, some of which may be unsafe when deployed in practical obstacle environments. To this end, this paper proposes an end-to-end planning method based model-free RL framework with optimization, which can achieve better learning performance with a safety guarantee. Firstly, for second-order drone systems, a differentiable high-order control barrier function (HOCBF) is introduced to ensure the output of the planning algorithm falls in a safe range. Then, a safety layer based on the HOCBF is proposed, which projects RL actions into a feasible solution set to guarantee safe exploration. Finally, we conducted a simulation for drone obstacle avoidance and validated the proposed method in the simulation environment. The experimental results demonstrate a significant enhancement over the baseline approach. Specifically, the proposed method achieved a substantial reduction in the average cumulative number of collisions per drone during training compared to the baseline. Additionally, in the testing phase, the proposed method realized a 43% improvement in the task success rate relative to the MADDPG.


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    Title :

    Collision-Free Path Planning for Multiple Drones Based on Safe Reinforcement Learning


    Contributors:
    Hong Chen (author) / Dan Huang (author) / Chenggang Wang (author) / Lu Ding (author) / Lei Song (author) / Hongtao Liu (author)


    Publication date :

    2024




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    Unknown





    Collision Free Path Planning

    Güvenç, Levent / Aksun‐Güvenç, Bilin / Zhu, Sheng et al. | Wiley | 2021