Efficient Path Planning for Mobile Robot Based on Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient.

Journal: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
Published Date:

Abstract

When a traditional Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm is used in mobile robot path planning, due to the limited observable environment of mobile robots, the training efficiency of the path planning model is low, and the convergence speed is slow. In this paper, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is introduced into the DDPG network, the former and current states of the mobile robot are combined to determine the actions of the robot, and a Batch Norm layer is added after each layer of the Actor network. At the same time, the reward function is optimized to guide the mobile robot to move faster towards the target point. In order to improve the learning efficiency, different normalization methods are used to normalize the distance and angle between the mobile robot and the target point, which are used as the input of the DDPG network model. When the model outputs the next action of the mobile robot, mixed noise composed of Gaussian noise and Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) noise is added. Finally, the simulation environment built by a ROS system and a Gazebo platform is used for experiments. The results show that the proposed algorithm can accelerate the convergence speed of DDPG, improve the generalization ability of the path planning model and improve the efficiency and success rate of mobile robot path planning.

Authors

  • Hui Gong
    Britton Chance Center for Biomedical Photonics, Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics-Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, Hubei, China.
  • Peng Wang
    Neuroengineering Laboratory, School of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin, China.
  • Cui Ni
    Information Science and Electrical Engineering, Shandong Jiao Tong University, Jinan 250357, China.
  • Nuo Cheng
    Information Science and Electrical Engineering, Shandong Jiao Tong University, Jinan 250357, China.