CTSAC: Curriculum-Based Transformer Soft Actor-Critic for Goal-Oriented Robot Exploration

With the increasing demand for efficient and flexible robotic exploration solutions, Reinforcement Learning (RL) is becoming a promising approach in the field of autonomous robotic exploration. However, current RL-based exploration algorithms often face limited environmental reasoning capabilities, slow convergence rates, and substantial challenges in Sim-To-Real (S2R) transfer. To address these issues, we propose a Curriculum Learning-based Transformer Reinforcement Learning Algorithm (CTSAC) aimed at improving both exploration efficiency and transfer performance. To enhance the robot's reasoning ability, a Transformer is integrated into the perception network of the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) framework, leveraging historical information to improve the farsightedness of the strategy. A periodic review-based curriculum learning is proposed, which enhances training efficiency while mitigating catastrophic forgetting during curriculum transitions. Training is conducted on the ROS-Gazebo continuous robotic simulation platform, with LiDAR clustering optimization to further reduce the S2R gap. Experimental results demonstrate the CTSAC algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art non-learning and learning-based algorithms in terms of success rate and success rate-weighted exploration time. Moreover, real-world experiments validate the strong S2R transfer capabilities of CTSAC.