Flying Through a Narrow Gap Using End-to-end Deep Reinforcement Learning Augmented with Curriculum Learning and Sim2Real

Abstract: Traversing through a tilted narrow gap is previously an intractable task for reinforcement learning mainly due to two challenges. First, searching feasible trajectories is not trivial because the goal behind the gap is difficult to reach. Second, the error tolerance after Sim2Real is low due to the relatively high speed in comparison to the gap's narrow dimensions. This problem is aggravated by the intractability of collecting real-world data due to the risk of collision damage. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework that solves this task successfully by addressing both problems. To search for dynamically feasible flight trajectories, we use curriculum learning to guide the agent towards the sparse reward behind the obstacle. To tackle the Sim2Real problem, we propose a Sim2Real framework that can transfer control commands to a real quadrotor without using real flight data. To the best of our knowledge, our paper is the first work that accomplishes successful gap traversing task purely using deep reinforcement learning.