Deep Reinforcement Learning for UAV Intelligent Mission Planning

Rapid and precise air operation mission planning is a key technology in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) autonomous combat in battles. In this paper, an end‐to‐end UAV intelligent mission planning method based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is proposed to solve the shortcomings of the traditional intelligent optimization algorithm, such as relying on simple, static, low‐dimensional scenarios, and poor scalability. Specifically, the suppression of enemy air defense (SEAD) mission planning is described as a sequential decision‐making problem and formalized as a Markov decision process (MDP). Then, the SEAD intelligent planning model based on the proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm is established and a general intelligent planning architecture is proposed. Furthermore, three policy training tricks, i.e., domain randomization, maximizing policy entropy, and underlying network parameter sharing, are introduced to improve the learning performance and generalizability of PPO. Experiments results show that the model in this work is efficient and stable, and can be adapted to the unknown continuous high‐dimensional environment. It can be concluded that the UAV intelligent mission planning model based on DRL has powerful intelligent planning performance, and provides a new idea for researching UAV autonomy.