arrow
Return

A meta-reinforcement learning method for adaptive payload transportation with variations

delete2025-07-01
delete0
PRE
AI
J
Jingyu Chen *
R
Ruidong Ma
M
Meng Xu
C
Candan, Fethi
L
Lyudmila Mihaylova
J
John Oyekan
DOI:10.1016/j.neucom.2025.130032delete
deleteOriginal
deleteOriginal request for help
deleteShare
deleteSave
Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
The safe transport of cable-suspended payloads by a group of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) depends on their capacity to effectively respond to fluctuations in the dynamics caused by external variations, such as wind gusts. For group transportation with obstacles, internal variations, such as changes in formation, can also alter the space occupancy of the system related to collision detection. However, traditional adaptive learning methods are challenging to adapt to these two variations. In this paper, we present a learning-based method for collision-free dual-UAV-payload transportation in the presence of varied wind force and formation change. It consists of an adaptive trajectory tracking controller based on meta-model-based reinforcement learning with online adaptation and a novel correction policy, and a path planner that can sample collision-free goal states of the system for the controller based on the meta-collision predictor. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed trajectory tracking controller outperforms state-of-the-art model-free, model-based, and variational inference methods in terms of payload tracking error reduction and robustness when dealing with the variations mentioned above. Specifically, the proposed controller reduces the average payload tracking error to less than 0.1 metres in most tasks without obstacles. Furthermore, by following the adapted paths generated by the path planner, the trajectory tracking controller can effectively track the payload while ensuring collision-free safety of the dual-UAV-payload system during navigation among obstacles. The success rate of the proposed method is more than 80% in all scenarios with obstacles. Our project website can be seen at https://sites.google.com/view/meta-payload-fly/ and the source code is available at https://github.com/wawachen/Meta-load-fly.
Keywords:
Reinforcement learning
Meta-learning
Cooperative transportation
Trajectory tracking
Path planning

Journal

Neurocomputing cover
Neurocomputing
IF:
6.5
Papers:
2.5W
Citations:
6.5W

Organization

U
University of International Business and Economics
Scholars:
488
Papers: 359
Citations: 3.9K
U
Univ Sheffield
Scholars:
884
Papers: 478
Citations: 178
U
Univ York
Scholars:
659
Papers: 387
Citations: 157
C
chinese acad sci
Scholars:
1.8W
Papers: 1.1W
Citations: 4.6K
researcher View more organizations