Update: I'm having to work on a different project for my master's so this will be indefinitely suspended. I hope to return to it in future.

My plan is to train a Jumping Sumo minidrone from Parrot to navigate a track using reinforcement learning. This project will be divided into several stages:

• Implement the ARSDK3 protocol in python to allow me control the drone directly via a PC and stream video as well
• Implement Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) in CNTK (maybe Tensorflow?)
• Use DDPG to train the drone to navigate a paper track
  • The higher the speed of the robot, the greater the reward
  • Negative rewards for leaving the track. I plan to train a convolutional network to decide whether or not the robot is within the track
  • At each time step, the state will be the last frame (or stack of frames) as well as last read speed from the robot
  • The agents actions will be speed [-100, 100] and turn [-100, 100]

More requirements will be added as the project progresses.

• Python 3
• OpenCV

• One Jumping Sumo (I am using a Jumping Race Max, other Jumping Drones should also work)
• Several batteries 😩

• I was able to install OpenCV 3 in my conda environment using: conda install -c menpo opencv3
• The minidrone module was adapted from forthtemple/py-faster-rcnn and haraisao/JumpingSumo-Python . As I am only interested in ground motion, I have limited my implementation to that (no jumping, ...)
• The Parrot ARSDK3 document can be found here. I was also able to find some useful information on their GitHub page.