Exploration of Unknown Environments Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

My research presents a method for efficient exploration of an outdoor, unknown area, which aims to achieve precise coverage of regions of interest within that area. While this method for autonomous exploration was designed for autonomous controllers in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the concepts apply to any vehicle which uses autonomous navigation. We consider an environment with areas of interest of various sizes littered throughout, and a reinforcement learning agent which is tasked with discovering and mapping these areas in an efficient manner.