Improving Generalization in Collision Avoidance for Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles via Causal Representation Learning

Deep-reinforcement-learning-based multi-UAV collision avoidance and navigation methods have made significant progress. However, the fundamental challenge of those methods is their restricted capability to generalize beyond the specific scenario in which they are trained on. We find that the cause of the generalization failures is attributed to spurious correlation. To solve this generalization problem, we propose a causal representation learning method to identify the causal representations from images. Specifically, our method can neglect factors of variation that are irrelevant to the deep reinforcement learning task through causal intervention. Subsequently, the causal representations are fed into the policy network for action prediction. Extensive testing reveals that our proposed method exhibits better generalization results compared to state-of-the-art methods in different testing scenes.