Enhancing UAV Aerial Docking: A Hybrid Approach Combining Offline and Online Reinforcement Learning

In our study, we explore the task of performing docking maneuvers between two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using a combination of offline and online reinforcement learning (RL) methods. This task requires a UAV to accomplish external docking while maintaining stable flight control, representing two distinct types of objectives at the task execution level. Direct online RL training could lead to catastrophic forgetting, resulting in training failure. To overcome these challenges, we design a rule-based expert controller and accumulate an extensive dataset. Based on this, we concurrently design a series of rewards and train a guiding policy through offline RL. Then, we conduct comparative verification on different RL methods, ultimately selecting online RL to fine-tune the model trained offline. This strategy effectively combines the efficiency of offline RL with the exploratory capabilities of online RL. Our approach improves the success rate of the UAV’s aerial docking task, increasing it from 40% under the expert policy to 95%.