• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.152-163
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• 2022

In this paper, we present a method to enable an unmanned aerial vehicle to drop the sonobuoy, an essential element of anti-submarine warfare, in an optimal deployment. To this end, an environment simulating the distribution of sound detection performance was configured through the Unity game engine, and the environment directly configured using Unity ML-Agents and the reinforcement learning algorithm written in Python from the outside communicated with each other and learned. In particular, reinforcement learning is introduced to prevent the accumulation of wrong actions and affect learning, and to secure the maximum detection area for the sonobuoy while the vehicle flies to the target point in the shortest time. The optimal placement of the sonobuoy was achieved by applying the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm. As a result of the learning, the agent flew through the sea area and passed only the points to achieve the optimal placement among the 70 target candidates. This means that an autonomous aerial vehicle that deploys a sonobuoy in the shortest time and maximum detection area, which is the requirement for optimal placement, has been implemented.