The Dynamic Window Approach (DWA) is widely used for local navigation, but its performance depends strongly on parameters that are typically fixed before navigation. In particular, the appropriate prediction horizon can vary with local free space: longer horizons support efficient motion in open areas, whereas shorter horizons help preserve feasible motions in narrow or cluttered regions. This paper proposes D3DWA, an adaptive DWA framework based on a Dueling Double Deep Q-Network (D3QN), which jointly selects the DWA evaluation weights and prediction horizon from a continuous navigation state at every control step while retaining DWA's trajectory generation and collision checking. In eight simulated environments, including unseen layouts, D3DWA reached every goal. Real-robot experiments further showed that D3DWA completed all three tested configurations, including a constrained case in which the weights-only variant timed out. These results demonstrate the benefit of jointly adapting the evaluation weights and prediction horizon. Additional material is available at https://mertcookimg.github.io/d3dwa/
Figures & tables
Fig. 1 : Concept of D3DWA.
Fig. 2 : System Overview of D3DWA
Fig. 3 : Evaluation Environments.
Method
TS1
TS2
TS3
TS4
US1
H1
H2
H3
Time
TL
PD
Time
TL
PD
Time
TL
PD
Time
TL
PD
Time
TL
PD
Time
TL
PD
Time
TL
PD
Time
TL
PD
DWA I (1,1,2)
18.53
3.58
0.93
T
–
–
T
–
–
T
–
–
T
–
–
22.11
7.30
5.25
T
–
–
T
–
–
DWA II (1,2,1)
40.42
6.90
14.76
29.65
7.09
3.61
29.20
4.51
6.41
T
–
–
T
–
–
51.19
8.04
5.23
24.32
6.84
4.07
T
–
–
DWA III (2,1,1)
17.08
3.58
0.90
T
–
–
29.48
4.40
5.58
T
–
–
47.63
5.29
7.22
24.45
6.01
1.79
22.03
5.13
1.73
51.15
11.83
13.42
DQDWA [ 2 ]
16.59
3.58
0.96
T
–
–
49.43
9.54
17.23
T
–
–
46.09
5.38
6.95
58.41
9.86
13.53
21.56
5.14
1.81
T
–
–
D3DWA (w/o horizon)
18.05
3.59
0.92
T
–
–
28.56
4.42
5.90
T
–
–
37.39
5.81
7.35
36.45
10.04
10.26
25.26
6.67
4.70
37.82
9.95
6.26
TABLE I : Simulation results following the Case S1 protocol of [ 2 ] . TL and PD denote trajectory length and movement posture displacement, respectively. T denotes timeout. Best values in each environment and metric are shown in bold.
Group
Parameter
Value
Platform
lidar field of view
240∘
robot radius r / safety margin m
0.15 / 0.05 m
max. translational velocity
0.4 m/s
max. angular velocity
2.0 rad/s
max. translational acceleration
2.0m/s2
max. angular acceleration
3.0rad/s2
TABLE II : Parameter values instantiating the framework of Section III.
Fig. 4 : Executed trajectories of DWA III ( {wp,wc,ws}={2,1,1} ), coloured by elapsed time. The robot starts at the origin and the goal is marked in red.
Fig. 5 : Executed trajectories of the tabular baseline DQDWA [ 2 ] , coloured by elapsed time. The robot starts at the origin and the goal is marked in red.
Fig. 6 : Executed trajectories of D3DWA. Top row (a)–(h): coloured by elapsed time. Bottom row (i)–(p): the same trajectories coloured by the prediction horizon τ selected by the agent. The robot starts at the origin and the goal is marked in red.
Fig. 7 : Real-robot experimental setup.
Fig. 8 : Case R1 Trajectories.
Fig. 9 : Case R2 Trajectories.
Fig. 10 : Case R3 Trajectories.
Fig. 11 : D3DWA in all cases coloured by prediction horizon τ selected by the agent.
Method
Case R1
Case R2
Case R3
Time
TL
PD
Time
TL
PD
Time
TL
PD
DWA I (1,1,2)
12.45
3.14
1.35
T
–
–
19.38
5.89
4.07
DWA II (1,2,1)
T
–
–
T
–
–
24.76
4.45
5.07
DWA III (2,1,1)
19.10
3.43
2.93
T
–
–
22.62
4.33
5.19
DQDWA [ 2 ]
13.99
3.08
1.41
20.22
3.36
5.10
24.27
6.02
6.18
D3DWA (w/o horizon)
14.91
3.22
1.72
T
–
–
38.70
5.51
11.64
TABLE III : Real-robot results. One trial per condition. T denotes timeout. Best values for each case and metric are shown in bold.
In this paper, we present a novel hybrid approach that combines Reinforcement Learning (RL) with Dynamic Window Approach (DWA) for adaptive 3D local navigation of high-degree-of-freedom robotic systems. Our method leverages sparse point cloud data to dynamically adjust both the motion and the shape of a deformable microrobot, enabling the system to navigate toward a goal in complex, constrained environments while maximizing the occupied volume. We evaluate our framework in a simulated vascular network. Experimental results, based on 1080 trials, indicate that integrating RL with a DWA-based local planner significantly enhances both deformation and navigation capabilities compared to pure RL and model-based methods. In particular, the proposed autonomous controller consistently achieves high deformation and near-perfect path completion during training and maintains robust performance in unseen scenarios. These findings highlight the potential of hybrid planning strategies for efficient and adaptive 3D navigation under sparse sensory conditions.
Humanoids and Human Centered Mechatronics Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia 16163, Genoa, Italy · Dept. of Information Engineering and Mathematics University of Siena 53100, Siena, Italy
World-action models give visual navigation agents a way to anticipate how candidate actions will change future observations and to act from the predicted consequences. For drones, this capability must operate under tight accuracy and efficiency constraints. We present DroneWAM, an efficient world-action model for drone visual navigation. DroneWAM adopts a JEPA-based architecture to model future states directly in representation space, avoiding the cost of explicit future image generation. A pretrained Resampler further compresses dense encoder features into fewer latent tokens, reducing the computation repeated at each imagined step. We also introduce adaptive rollout, where a preference-trained Gate adaptively allocates prediction depth according to the current scene. To support learning under richer aerial motion, we construct DroneNav-6D, a simulated visual navigation dataset with synchronized RGB observations, 6-DoF flight trajectories, control commands, and randomized wind disturbances. On DroneNav-6D, DroneWAM achieves the best trajectory accuracy among the compared methods. Adaptive rollout further reduces the average prediction depth from 8 to 4.58 while improving trajectory accuracy, demonstrating that predictive computation can be allocated more effectively across scenes. Codes and data will be released.
Liang Yao, Fan Liu, Hongbo Lu +5
Hohai University · Key Laboratory of Water Big Data Technology of Ministry of Water Resources · Shanghai Jiao Tong University +4
Pure pursuit and its variants are widely used for mobile robot path tracking owing to their simplicity and computational efficiency. However, many conventional approaches do not explicitly account for velocity and acceleration constraints, resulting in discrepancies between commanded and actual velocities that result in overshoot and degraded tracking performance. To address this problem, this paper proposes dynamic window pure pursuit (DWPP), which fundamentally reformulates the command velocity computation process to explicitly incorporate velocity and acceleration constraints. Specifically, DWPP formulates command velocity computation in the velocity space (the v-ω plane) and selects the command velocity as the point within the dynamic window that is closest to the line ω=κv. Experimental results demonstrate that DWPP avoids constraint-violating commands and achieves superior path-tracking accuracy compared with conventional pure pursuit methods. The proposed method has been integrated into the official Nav2 repository and is publicly available (https://github.com/ros-navigation/navigation2).