Enhancing UAV Path Planning Efficiency Through Accelerated Learning

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly essential in various fields such as surveillance, reconnaissance, and telecommunications. This study aims to develop a learning algorithm for the path planning of UAV wireless communication relays, which can reduce storage requirements and accelerate Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) convergence. Assuming the system possesses terrain maps of the area and can estimate user locations using localization algorithms or direct GPS reporting, it can input these parameters into the learning algorithms to achieve optimized path planning performance. However, higher resolution terrain maps are necessary to extract topological information such as terrain height, object distances, and signal blockages. This requirement increases memory and storage demands on UAVs while also lengthening convergence times in DRL algorithms. Similarly, defining the telecommunication coverage map in UAV wireless communication relays using these terrain maps and user position estimations demands higher memory and storage utilization for the learning path planning algorithms. Our approach reduces path planning training time by applying a dimensionality reduction technique based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA), sample combination, Prioritized Experience Replay (PER), and the combination of Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) loss calculations in the coverage map estimates, thereby enhancing a Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3) algorithm. The proposed solution reduces the convergence episodes needed for basic training by approximately four times compared to the traditional TD3.