Quantum Exploration-based Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Robot Path Planning in Sparse-Reward Environment

Abstract

With the latest developments in sensors, battery, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, robots can perform missions in unstructured environments (e.g., disaster sites). However, their adaptation speed is still slow due to their limited onboard computing capability and dynamic disruption from environments, leading to inaccurate planning and delayed emergency reactions. Even though reinforcement learning increases robots’ exploration speed by fusing effective guidance, the numerous interactions make the learning time-consuming and even risky (e.g., collisions). To fundamentally improve robot adaptation speed, this work seeks help from quantum power. A novel Quantum Exploration based Dreamer model (QED) was developed to facilitate reinforcement learning explorations. QED based on stochastic quantum walker quickly explores environments, evaluates action quality, and obtains a global optimal exploration strategy; then, these high-quality exploration samples will be used to facilitate reinforcement learning speed. A theoretical benefit of QED is facilitating reinforcement learning speed without changing the underlying learning architecture, which makes the proposed QED applicable to general robot learning scenarios. To validate QED effectiveness, a robot path-planning task in an obstacle-dense environment was designed. The number of needed training episodes validated the effectiveness. The results show that QED achieves around ten times faster policy learning compared with Monte Carlo tree-based reinforcement learning methods and vanilla reinforcement learning methods.