카메라 기반 강화학습을 이용한 드론 장애물 회피 알고리즘

Abstract

Among drone autonomous flight technologies, obstacle avoidance is a very important technology that can prevent damage to drones or surrounding environments and prevent danger. Although the LiDAR sensor-based obstacle avoidance method shows relatively high accuracy and is widely used in recent studies, it has disadvantages of high unit price and limited processing capacity for visual information. Therefore, this paper proposes an obstacle avoidance algorithm for drones using camera-based PPO(Proximal Policy Optimization) reinforcement learning, which is relatively inexpensive and highly scalable using visual information. Drone, obstacles, target points, etc. are randomly located in a learning environment in the three-dimensional space, stereo images are obtained using a Unity camera, and then YOLov4Tiny object detection is performed. Next, the distance between the drone and the detected object is measured through triangulation of the stereo camera. Based on this distance, the presence or absence of obstacles is determined. Penalties are set if they are obstacles and rewards are given if they are target points. The experimennt of this method shows that a camera-based obstacle avoidance algorithm can be a sufficiently similar level of accuracy and average target point arrival time compared to a LiDAR-based obstacle avoidance algorithm, so it is highly likely to be used.