Maneuver Decision-Making through Automatic Curriculum Reinforcement Learning without Handcrafted Reward Functions

Maneuver decision-making is essential for autonomous air combat. However, previous methods usually make decisions to aim at the target instead of hitting the target and use discrete action spaces instead of continuous action spaces. While these simplifications make maneuver decision-making easier, they also make maneuver decision-making more unrealistic. Meanwhile, previous studies usually rely on handcrafted reward functions, which are troublesome to design. Therefore, to solve these problems, we propose an automatic curriculum reinforcement learning method that enables agents to maneuver effectively in air combat from scratch. On the basis of curriculum reinforcement learning, maneuver decision-making is divided into a series of sub-tasks from easy to difficult. Thus, agents can gradually learn how to complete a series of sub-tasks, from easy to difficult without handcrafted reward functions. The ablation studies show that automatic curriculum learning is essential for reinforcement learning; namely, agents cannot make effective decisions without curriculum learning. Simulations show that, after training, agents are able to make effective decisions given different states, including tracking, attacking, and escaping, which are both rational and interpretable.