Intelligent autonomous navigation for UAVs: a strategic hierarchical path planning framework
To address the challenge that single algorithms struggle to balance global exploration and local obstacle avoidance, and are prone to falling into local optima in complex environments, this paper proposes a Strategic Hierarchical Path Planning (SHPP) framework. This framework decouples the 3D navigation task into three synergistic layers. The top layer employs a reinforcement learning network equipped with a Credit Alignment Mechanism (CAM) to provide macroscopic guidance, eliminating credit assignment pollution and escaping local minima. The middle layer introduces a Dual-Guided Particle Swarm Optimization (DG-PSO) algorithm to map discrete commands into continuous smooth trajectories. The bottom layer executes physical collision avoidance and tracking based on the Artificial Potential Field (APF) method. Simulations indicate that the system can establish a stable policy in approximately 625 episodes, achieving an average reward of 95.6. Furthermore, benefiting from the hierarchical architecture's smooth optimization in continuous space, the average flight path length is 138.3 meters, a reduction of approximately 19% compared to traditional discrete decision-making models. These quantitative results fully validate the superior performance of the proposed architecture in complex 3D environments.