Hazard-Aware Weighted Advantage Combination for UAV Target Tracking and Obstacle Avoidance

In recent years, the rapid evolution of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has brought about transformative changes across various industries. However, addressing fundamental challenges in UAV technology, particularly target tracking and obstacle avoidance, remains crucial for wildlife protection, military industry security, etc. Many existing methods based on reinforcement learning to solve UAV multi-tasks need to be redesigned and retrained, and cannot be quickly and effectively extended to other scenarios. To this end, we propose a novel solution based on a hazard-aware weighted advantage combination for UAV target tracking and obstacle avoidance. First, we independently trained the UAV target tracking and obstacle avoidance using the dueling double deep Q-network reinforcement learning algorithm. Subsequently, in a multitasking scenario, we introduce the two pre-trained networks. Meanwhile, we design a weight determined by the present risk level encountered by the UAV. This weight is utilized to perform a weighted summation of the advantage values from both networks, eliminating the need for retraining to obtain the final action. We validate our approach through extensive simulation experiments in the robotics simulator known as CoppeliaSim. The results demonstrate that our method outper-forms current state-of-the-art techniques, achieving superior performance in both tracking accuracy and avoidance of collisions.