Autonomous Control of Combat Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to Evade Surface-to-Air Missiles Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

This paper proposes a new reinforcement learning approach for executing combat unmanned aerial vehicle (CUAV) missions. We consider missions with the following goals: guided missile avoidance, shortest-path flight and formation flight. For reinforcement learning, the representation of the current agent state is important. We propose a novel method of using the coordinates and angle of a CUAV to effectively represent its state. Furthermore, we develop a reinforcement learning algorithm with enhanced exploration through amplification of the imitation effect (AIE). This algorithm consists of self-imitation learning and random network distillation algorithms. We assert that these two algorithms complement each other and that combining them amplifies the imitation effect for exploration. Empirical results show that the proposed AIE approach is highly effective at finding a CUAV’s shortest-flight path while avoiding enemy missiles. Test results confirm that with our method, a single CUAV reaches its target from its starting point 95% of the time and a squadron of four simultaneously operating CUAVs reaches the target 70% of the time.