Hybrid Motion Planning with Deep Reinforcement Learning for Mobile Robot Navigation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid motion planning framework combining global graph-based path planning with local deep reinforcement learning to improve autonomous robot navigation in complex, dynamic environments, emphasizing safety and efficiency.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel hybrid approach that integrates global planning with semantic-aware local DRL, enhancing navigation performance in complex environments.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in success rate and collision avoidance

Achieves lower collision rates and faster goal reaching times

Demonstrates robustness in realistic simulation environments

Abstract

Autonomous mobile robots operating in complex, dynamic environments face the dual challenge of navigating large-scale, structurally diverse spaces with static obstacles while safely interacting with various moving agents. Traditional graph-based planners excel at long-range pathfinding but lack reactivity, while Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods demonstrate strong collision avoidance but often fail to reach distant goals due to a lack of global context. We propose Hybrid Motion Planning with Deep Reinforcement Learning (HMP-DRL), a hybrid framework that bridges this gap. Our approach utilizes a graph-based global planner to generate a path, which is integrated into a local DRL policy via a sequence of checkpoints encoded in both the state space and reward function. To ensure social compliance, the local planner employs an entity-aware reward structure that dynamically adjusts safety margins and penalties based on the semantic type of surrounding agents. We validate the proposed method through extensive testing in a realistic simulation environment derived from real-world map data. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that HMP-DRL consistently outperforms other methods, including state-of-the-art approaches, in terms of key metrics of robot navigation: success rate, collision rate, and time to reach the goal. Overall, these findings confirm that integrating long-term path guidance with semantically-aware local control significantly enhances both the safety and reliability of autonomous navigation in complex human-centric settings.