On Solving the 2-Dimensional Greedy Shooter Problem for UAVs

Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), autonomously-guided aircraft, are widely used for tasks involving surveillance and reconnaissance. A version of the pursuit-evasion problems centered around UAVs and its variants has been extensively studied in recent years due to numerous breakthroughs in AI. We present an approach to UAV pursuit-evasion in a 2D aerial-engagement environment using reinforcement learning (RL), a machine learning paradigm concerned with goal-oriented algorithms. In this work, a UAV wielding the greedy shooter strategy engages with a UAV trained using deep Q-learning techniques. Simulated results show that the latter UAV wins every engagement in which the UAVs are suffciently separated during initialization. This approach highlights an exhaustive and robust application of reinforcement learning to pursuit-evasion that provides insight into effective strategies for UAV flight and interaction.