Vision-based Non-Cooperative Intruder Detect and Avoid using Deep Learning Techniques

Abstract:
The proliferation of Autonomous Aerial Vehicles (AAVs) necessitates robust solutions for dynamic obstacle avoidance, particularly against non-cooperative intruders whose trajectories are unpredictable. While traditional path-planning algorithms excel in static environments, they struggle with dynamic obstacles due to the inherent difficulty in accurately estimating and registering their real-time depth and velocity into a world model. This paper presents a novel two-stage vision-based framework that leverages deep learning for reactive avoidance of non-cooperative dynamic intruders. Our approach decouples the perception and decision-making processes: an object detection deep neural network first processes monocular camera images to detect and track the 2D pixel coordinates of intruders. This perceptual output is then fed into a deep reinforcement learning agent, which learns a mapping from the intruder's image-space location to a high-level avoidance maneuver. This leads to more efficient learning, as the RL agent focuses solely on the policy without the burden of learning visual features. The advantage of using RL lies in its ability to handle partially observable situations—because reliable depth or full 3-D position information is not always readily available from monocular imagery, the RL agent learns to act based on the observable visual cues. Simulation results confirm that our proposed framework provides an effective solution for vision-based, non-cooperative intruder avoidance.

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