Air combat maneuver decision based on deep reinforcement learning with auxiliary reward

For air combat maneuvering decision, the sparse reward during the application of deep reinforcement learning limits the exploration efficiency of the agents. To address this challenge, we propose an auxiliary reward function considering the impact of angle, range, and altitude. Furthermore, we investigate the influences of the network nodes, layers, and the learning rate on decision system, and reasonable parameter ranges are provided, which can serve as a guideline. Finally, four typical air combat scenarios demonstrate good adaptability and effectiveness of the proposed scheme, and the auxiliary reward significantly improves the learning ability of deep Q network (DQN) by leading the agents to explore more intently. Compared with the original deep deterministic policy gradient and soft actor critic algorithm, the proposed method exhibits superior exploration capability with higher reward, indicating that the trained agent can adapt to different air combats with good performance. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2024.