A Fast and Robust Algorithm with Reinforcement Learning for Large UAV Cluster Mission Planning

Abstract

Large Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) clusters, containing hundreds of UAVs, have widely been used in the modern world. Therein, mission planning is the core of large UAV cluster collaborative systems. In this paper, we propose a mission planning method by introducing the Simple Attention Model (SAM) into Dynamic Information Reinforcement Learning (DIRL), named DIRL-SAM. To reduce the computational complexity of the original attention model, we derive the SAM with a lightweight interactive model to rapidly extract high-dimensional features of the cluster information. In DIRL, dynamic training conditions are considered to simulate different mission environments. Meanwhile, the data expansion in DIRL guarantees the convergence of the model in these dynamic environments, which improves the robustness of the algorithm. Finally, the simulation experiment results show that the proposed method can adaptively provide feasible mission planning schemes with second-level solution speed and that it exhibits excellent generalization performance in large-scale cluster planning problems.

Keywords

• mission planning
• UAV cluster
• reinforcement learning
• attention model
• combinational optimization