In this paper, we propose a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG)-based path-planning method for mobile robots by applying the hindsight experience replay (HER) technique to overcome the performance degradation resulting from sparse reward problems occurring in autonomous driving mobile robots. The mobile robot in our analysis was a robot operating system-based TurtleBot3, and the experimental environment was a virtual simulation based on Gazebo. A fully connected neural network was used as the DDPG network based on the actor–critic architecture. Noise was added to the actor network. The robot recognized an unknown environment by measuring distances using a laser sensor and determined the optimized policy to reach its destination. The HER technique improved the learning performance by generating three new episodes with normal experience from a failed episode. The proposed method demonstrated that the HER technique could help mitigate the sparse reward problem; this was further corroborated by the successful autonomous driving results obtained after applying the proposed method to two reward systems, as well as actual experimental results.

In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning-based end-to-end learning method for the autonomous driving of a mobile robot in a dynamic environment with obstacles. Applying two additional techniques for reinforcement learning simultaneously helps the mobile robot in finding an optimal policy to reach the destination without collisions. First, the multifunctional reward-shaping technique guides the agent toward the goal by utilizing information about the destination and obstacles. Next, employing the hindsight experience replay technique to address the experience imbalance caused by the sparse reward problem assists the agent in finding the optimal policy. We validated the proposed technique in both simulation and real-world environments. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed method, we compared experiments for five different cases.