Hierarchical path planner for unknown space exploration using reinforcement learning-based intelligent frontier selection

Path planning in unknown environments is extremely useful for some specific tasks, such as exploration of outer space planets, search and rescue in disaster areas, home sweeping services, etc. However, existing frontier-based path planners suffer from insufficient exploration, while reinforcement learning (RL)-based ones are confronted with problems in efficient training and effective searching. To overcome the above problems, this paper proposes a novel hierarchical path planner for unknown space exploration using RL-based intelligent frontier selection. Firstly, by decomposing the path planner into three-layered architecture (including the perception layer, planning layer, and control layer) and using edge detection to find potential frontiers to track, the path search space is shrunk from the whole map to a handful of points of interest, which significantly saves the computational resources in both training and execution processes. Secondly, one of the advanced RL algorithms, trust region policy optimization (TRPO), is used as a judge to select the best frontier for the robot to track, which ensures the optimality of the path planner with a shorter path length. The proposed method is validated through simulation and compared with both classic and state-of-the-art methods. Results show that the training process could be greatly accelerated compared with the traditional deep-Q network (DQN). Moreover, the proposed method has 4.2%–14.3% improvement in exploration region rate and achieves the highest exploration completeness.