Towards Deployment of Deep-Reinforcement-Learning-Based Obstacle Avoidance into Conventional Autonomous Navigation Systems

Recently, mobile robots have become important tools in various industries, especially in logistics. Deep reinforcement learning emerged as an alternative planning method to replace overly conservative approaches and promises more efficient and flexible navigation. However, deep reinforcement learning approaches are not suitable for long-range navigation due to their proneness to local minima and lack of long term memory, which hinders its widespread integration into industrial applications of mobile robotics. In this paper, we propose a navigation system incorporating deep-reinforcement-learning-based local planners into conventional navigation stacks for long-range navigation. Therefore, a framework for training and testing the deep reinforcement learning algorithms along with classic approaches is presented. We evaluated our deep-reinforcement-learning-enhanced navigation system against various conventional planners and found that our system outperforms them in terms of safety, efficiency and robustness.