Novel Reward Function for Autonomous Drone Navigating in Indoor Environment

Unmanned aerial vehicles are gaining in popularity with the development of science and technology, and are being used for a wide range of purposes, including surveillance, rescue, delivery of goods, and data collection. In particular, the ability to avoid obstacles during navigation without human oversight is one of the essential capabilities that a drone must possess. Many works currently have solved this problem by implementing deep reinforcement learning (DRL) model. The essential core of a DRL model is reward function. Therefore, this paper proposes a new reward function with appropriate action space and employs dueling double deep Q-Networks to train a drone to navigate in indoor environment without collision.