DCNN-GA: A Deep Neural Net Architecture for Navigation of UAV in Indoor Environment

The applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in military, intelligent transportation, agriculture, rescue operations, natural environment mapping, and many other allied domains has increased exponentially during the past few years. Some of the use cases of their applications range from aerial surveillance, data retrieval to their use in real-time communicative networks. Though UAVs were traditionally used only outdoors, many of its indoor applications like for rescue operations, inventory tracking in warehouses, etc., have recently emerged and these use cases are being actively explored. One of the major challenges for indoor drone applications is navigation and obstacle avoidance. Due to indoor operations, the global positioning system fails in accurate localization and navigation. To address this issue, we introduce a scheme that facilitates the autonomous navigation of UAVs (which have an onboard camera) in the indoor corridors of a building using deep-neural-networks-based processing of images. For a deep neural network, the selection of a good combination of hyperparameters for a better prediction is a complicated task. In this article, the hyperparameters tuning of a convolutional neural network is achieved by using genetic algorithms. The proposed architecture (DCNN-GA) is compared with state-of-the-art ImageNet models. The experimental results show the minimum loss and high performance of the proposed algorithm.