Intercept Guidance of Maneuvering Targets with Deep Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, a novel guidance law based on a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm is presented to deal with the maneuvering target interception problem using a deep deterministic policy gradient descent neural network. We take the missile’s line-of-sight (LOS) rate as the observation of the RL algorithm and propose a novel reward function, which is constructed with the miss distance and LOS rate to train the neural network off-line. In the guidance process, the trained neural network has the capacity of mapping the missile’s LOS rate to the normal acceleration of the missile directly, so as to generate guidance commands in real time. Under the actor-critic (AC) framework, we adopt the twin-delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3) algorithm by taking the minimum value between a pair of critics to reduce overestimation. Simulation results show that the proposed TD3-based RL guidance law outperforms the current state of the RL guidance law, has better performance to cope with continuous action and state space, and also has a faster convergence speed and higher reward. Furthermore, the proposed RL guidance law has better accuracy and robustness when intercepting a maneuvering target, and the LOS rate is converged.