Reinforcement Learning for Robot Navigation with Adaptive ExecutionDuration (AED) in a Semi-Markov Model

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have proven effective in robot navigation, especially in unknown environments, through directly mapping perception inputs into robot control commands. Most existing methods adopt uniform execution duration with robots taking commands at fixed intervals. As such, the length of execution duration becomes a crucial parameter to the navigation algorithm. In particular, if the duration is too short, then the navigation policy would be executed at a high frequency, with increased training difficulty and high computational cost. Meanwhile, if the duration is too long, then the policy becomes unable to handle complex situations, like those with crowded obstacles. It is thus tricky to find the "sweet" duration range; some duration values may render a DRL model to fail to find a navigation path. In this paper, we propose to employ adaptive execution duration to overcome this problem. Specifically, we formulate the navigation task as a Semi-Markov Decision Process (SMDP) problem to handle adaptive execution duration. We also improve the distributed proximal policy optimization (DPPO) algorithm and provide its theoretical guarantee for the specified SMDP problem. We evaluate our approach both in the simulator and on an actual robot. The results show that our approach outperforms the other DRL-based method (with fixed execution duration) by 10.3% in terms of the navigation success rate.