RINGS: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Enabled Large-scale UAV Network with Distributed Navigation, Mobility Control, and Resilience

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

Thanks to the significant technological advances in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the past few years have witnessed an explosive growth of UAVs in civilian and commercial applications. To ensure efficient and reliable auto-navigation and planning in these applications, there is an urgent need to develop the foundational technology that enables UAVs to have strong sensing, communications, and on-board computing capabilities, to adapt rapidly to the dynamically changing environment, to be resilient to extreme environmental conditions, and to be secure against data contamination and malicious attacks. The interdisciplinary nature of the proposed research will provide valuable research opportunities and hands-on projects for a diverse group of students. The goal of this project is to leverage and significantly advance the recent breakthroughs in NextG wireless communications, deep machine learning, hardware-aware model generation, and robust and trustworthy artificial intelligence, to enable the design of an intelligent and resilient UAV navigation and planning system. More specifically, this project will develop: (a) real-time communication assisted ambient sensing with multi-modality data fusion and machine learning assisted fast processing for global state tracking; (b) a multi-agent decentralized reinforcement learning (RL) framework with highly scalable computations and flexible latency tolerance; (c) deep learning based message passing for efficient communication and powerful hardware-aware neural architecture search for efficient on-board computation; and (d) comprehensive robustness and security design for system protection from outlier data, malicious poisoning attacks, and RL system attacks. The project will also conduct extensive performance evaluations to validate the developed approaches and algorithms. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.