Adaptive Risk-Tendency: Nano Drone Navigation in Cluttered Environments with Distributional Reinforcement Learning
Enabling the capability of assessing risk and making risk-aware decisions is essential to applying reinforcement learning to safety-critical robots like drones. In this paper, we investigate a specific case where a nano quadcopter robot learns to navigate an apriori-unknown cluttered environment under partial observability. We present a distributional reinforcement learning framework to generate adaptive risk-tendency policies. Specifically, we propose to use lower tail conditional variance of the learnt return distribution as intrinsic uncertainty estimation, and use exponentially weighted average forecasting (EWAF) to adapt the risk-tendency in accordance with the estimated uncertainty. In simulation and real-world empirical results, we show that (1) the most effective risk-tendency vary across states, (2) the agent with adaptive risk-tendency achieves superior performance compared to risk-neutral policy or risk-averse policy baselines.
Code (1)
Tasks
Distributional Reinforcement LearningDrone navigationNavigatereinforcement-learningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
A 64mW DNN-based Visual Navigation Engine for Autonomous Nano-Drones
Fully-autonomous miniaturized robots (e.g., drones), with artificial intelligence (AI) based visual navigation capabilities are extremely challenging drivers of Internet-of-Things edge intelligence capabilities. Visual n…
Autonomous NavigationVisual NavigationDistilling Tiny and Ultra-fast Deep Neural Networks for Autonomous Navigation on Nano-UAVs
Nano-sized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are ideal candidates for flying Internet-of-Things smart sensors to collect information in narrow spaces. This requires ultra-fast navigation under very tight memory/computation…
Autonomous NavigationCollision AvoidanceTiny-PULP-Dronets: Squeezing Neural Networks for Faster and Lighter Inference on Multi-Tasking Autonomous Nano-Drones
Pocket-sized autonomous nano-drones can revolutionize many robotic use cases, such as visual inspection in narrow, constrained spaces, and ensure safer human-robot interaction due to their tiny form factor and weight -- …
Autonomous NavigationChannel-Aware Distillation Transformer for Depth Estimation on Nano Drones
Autonomous navigation of drones using computer vision has achieved promising performance. Nano-sized drones based on edge computing platforms are lightweight, flexible, and cheap, thus suitable for exploring narrow space…
Autonomous NavigationDepth EstimationEdge-computingGPU+1AI and Vision based Autonomous Navigation of Nano-Drones in Partially-Known Environments
The miniaturisation of sensors and processors, the advancements in connected edge intelligence, and the exponential interest in Artificial Intelligence are boosting the affirmation of autonomous nano-size drones in the I…
Autonomous Navigation