How to operate an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) safely and efficiently in an interactive environment is challenging. A large amount of research has been devoted to improve the intelligence of a UAV while performing a mission, where finding an optimal maneuver decision-making policy of the UAV has become one of the key issues when we attempt to enable the UAV autonomy. In this paper, we propose a maneuver decision-making algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning, which generates efficient maneuvers for a UAV agent to execute the airdrop mission autonomously in an interactive environment. Particularly, the training set of the learning algorithm by the Prioritized Experience Replay is constructed, that can accelerate the convergence speed of decision network training in the algorithm. It is shown that a desirable and effective maneuver decision-making policy can be found by extensive experimental results.
Keywords: UAV; autonomous airdrop; deep reinforcement learning; maneuver decision-making; prioritized experience replay.