Using Deep Reinforcement Learning with Automatic Curriculum Learning for Mapless Navigation in Intralogistics

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleResearchpeer-review

Authors

  • Honghu Xue
  • Benedikt Hein
  • Mohamed Bakr
  • Georg Schildbach
  • Bengt Abel

External Organisational units

  • Institute of Neurogenetics
  • Technology and Innovation

Abstract

We propose a deep reinforcement learning approach for solving a mapless navigation problem in warehouse scenarios. In our approach, an automatic guided vehicle is equipped with two LiDAR sensors and one frontal RGB camera and learns to perform a targeted navigation task. The challenges reside in the sparseness of positive samples for learning, multi-modal sensor perception with partial observability, the demand for accurate steering maneuvers together with long training cycles. To address these points, we propose NavACL-Q as an automatic curriculum learning method in combination with a distributed version of the soft actor-critic algorithm. The performance of the learning algorithm is evaluated exhaustively in a different warehouse environment to validate both robustness and generalizability of the learned policy. Results in NVIDIA Isaac Sim demonstrates that our trained agent significantly outperforms the map-based navigation pipeline provided by NVIDIA Isaac Sim with an increased agent-goal distance of 3 m and a wider initial relative agent-goal rotation of approximately 45∘. The ablation studies also suggest that NavACL-Q greatly facilitates the whole learning process with a performance gain of roughly 40% compared to training with random starts and a pre-trained feature extractor manifestly boosts the performance by approximately 60%.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number3153
Number of pages30
JournalApplied Sciences : open access journal
Volume12.2022
Issue number6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 19 Mar 2022