English

Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Point-to-Point UAV Navigation

Robotics 2025-09-18 v1 Systems and Control Systems and Control

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in automated inspection, delivery, and navigation tasks that require reliable autonomy. This project develops a reinforcement learning (RL) approach to enable a single UAV to autonomously navigate between predefined points without manual intervention. The drone learns navigation policies through trial-and-error interaction, using a custom reward function that encourages goal-reaching efficiency while penalizing collisions and unsafe behavior. The control system integrates ROS with a Gym-compatible training environment, enabling flexible deployment and testing. After training, the learned policy is deployed on a real UAV platform and evaluated under practical conditions. Results show that the UAV can successfully perform autonomous navigation with minimal human oversight, demonstrating the viability of RL-based control for point-to-point drone operations in real-world scenarios.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.13943,
  title  = {Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Point-to-Point UAV Navigation},
  author = {Salim Oyinlola and Nitesh Subedi and Soumik Sarkar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.13943},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Presented at the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Symposium at the Translational AI Centre in Iowa State University

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:41:50.360Z