Papers › Monocular Obstacle Avoidance Based on Inverse PPO for Fixed-wing UAVs

Monocular Obstacle Avoidance Based on Inverse PPO for Fixed-wing UAVs

27 Nov 2024arXiv:2411.18009archive 2025-07-28

Haochen Chai, Meimei Su, Yang Lyu, ZhunGa Liu, Chunhui Zhao, Quan Pan

Fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are one of the most commonly used platforms for the burgeoning Low-altitude Economy (LAE) and Urban Air Mobility (UAM), due to their long endurance and high-speed capabilities. Classical obstacle avoidance systems, which rely on prior maps or sophisticated sensors, face limitations in unknown low-altitude environments and small UAV platforms. In response, this paper proposes a lightweight deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based UAV collision avoidance system that enables a fixed-wing UAV to avoid unknown obstacles at cruise speed over 30m/s, with only onboard visual sensors. The proposed system employs a single-frame image depth inference module with a streamlined network architecture to ensure real-time obstacle detection, optimized for edge computing devices. After that, a reinforcement learning controller with a novel reward function is designed to balance the target approach and flight trajectory smoothness, satisfying the specific dynamic constraints and stability requirements of a fixed-wing UAV platform. An adaptive entropy adjustment mechanism is introduced to mitigate the exploration-exploitation trade-off inherent in DRL, improving training convergence and obstacle avoidance success rates. Extensive software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms other methods in obstacle avoidance efficiency and flight trajectory smoothness and confirm the feasibility of implementing the algorithm on edge devices. The source code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/ch9397/FixedWing-MonoPPO}.

PaperPDFCode

Code

ch9397/fixedwing-monoppo officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Collision AvoidanceDeep Reinforcement LearningEdge-computing

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

SPEED

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections