Learn Once Plan Arbitrarily (LOPA): Attention-Enhanced Deep Reinforcement Learning Method for Global Path Planning
This addresses path planning challenges for robotics or autonomous systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing DRL methods with attention mechanisms.
The paper tackles poor convergence and generalization in deep reinforcement learning for global path planning by proposing LOPA, an attention-enhanced method that uses dynamic local and global views; results show improved convergence, generalization, and path planning efficiency.
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods have recently shown promise in path planning tasks. However, when dealing with global planning tasks, these methods face serious challenges such as poor convergence and generalization. To this end, we propose an attention-enhanced DRL method called LOPA (Learn Once Plan Arbitrarily) in this paper. Firstly, we analyze the reasons of these problems from the perspective of DRL's observation, revealing that the traditional design causes DRL to be interfered by irrelevant map information. Secondly, we develop the LOPA which utilizes a novel attention-enhanced mechanism to attain an improved attention capability towards the key information of the observation. Such a mechanism is realized by two steps: (1) an attention model is built to transform the DRL's observation into two dynamic views: local and global, significantly guiding the LOPA to focus on the key information on the given maps; (2) a dual-channel network is constructed to process these two views and integrate them to attain an improved reasoning capability. The LOPA is validated via multi-objective global path planning experiments. The result suggests the LOPA has improved convergence and generalization performance as well as great path planning efficiency.