COMMON-SENSICAL INCENTIVE REWARD IN DEEP ACTOR-CRITIC REINFORCEMENT LEARNING FOR MOBILE ROBOT NAVIGATION

• Published in: International Journal of Innovative Computing, Information and Control
• Main Author: Sendari S.; Muladi; Ardiyansyah F.; Setumin S.; Mokhtar N.B.; Lin H.-I.; Hartono P.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: ICIC International 2024
• Online Access: https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85186911357&doi=10.24507%2fijicic.20.02.373&partnerID=40&md5=1b41795e03a07d1af74236f5854d811a

Recently, various Deep Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning (DAC-RL) algorithms have been widely utilized for training mobile robots in acquiring navigational policies. However, they usually need a preventively long learning time to achieve good policies. This research proposes a two-stage training mechanism infused with human common-sensical prior knowledge, named Two Stages DAC-RL with incentive reward, to alleviate this problem. The actor-critic networks were pre-trained in a simple environment to acquire a basic policy. Afterward, the basic policy was transferred to initialize the training process of a new navigational policy in more complex environments. This study also infused humans’ common-sensical prior knowledge to further mitigate the RL learning burden by giving incentive rewards in beneficial situations for the navigation task. The experiments tested this research’s algorithms against navigation tasks in which the robot should efficiently reach designated goals. The tasks were made more challenging by requiring the robot to cross some corridors to reach the goal while avoiding obstacles. The results showed that the proposed algorithm worked efficiently regarding various start-goal positions across the corridors. © 2024, Int. J. Innov. Comput. Inf. Control. All rights reserved.