Obstacle Avoidance and Navigation Utilizing Reinforcement Learning with Reward Shaping

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the obstacle avoidance and navigation problem in the robotic control area. For solving such a problem, we propose revised Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) and Proximal Policy Optimization algorithms with an improved reward shaping technique. We compare the performance between the original DDPG and PPO with the revised version of both on simulations with a real mobile robot and demonstrate that the proposed algorithms achieve better results.

Shengjun(Daniel) Zhang

Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering

My research interests include distributed optimization, statistical learning and control theory.