UAV Autonomous Navigation for Wireless Powered Data Collection with Onboard Deep Q-Network

Abstract: In a rechargeable wireless sensor network, utilizing the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a mobile base station (BS) to charge sensors and collect data effectively prolongs the network lifetime. In this paper, we jointly optimize the UAV’s flight trajectory, the sensor selection and operation modes to maximize the average data traffic of all sensors within a wireless sensor network (WSN) during finite UAV’s flight time, while ensuring the energy required for each sensor by wireless power transfer (WPT). We consider a practical scenario, where the UAV has no prior knowledge of sensor locations. The UAV performs autonomous navigation based on the status information obtained within the coverage area, which is modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP). The deep Q-network (DQN) is employed to execute the navigation based on the UAV position, the battery level state, channel conditions and current data traffic of sensors within the UAV’s coverage area. Our simulation results demonstrate that, the DQN algorithm significantly improves the network performance in terms of the average data traffic and trajectory design.

Keywords: unmanned aerial vehicle; wireless power transfer; deep Q-network; autonomous navigation