Engineering Commons^™

Proximal Policy Optimization For Radiation Source Search, Philippe Erol Proctor, Christof Teuscher, Adam A. Hecht, Marek Osiński

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Rapid search and localization for nuclear sources can be an important aspect in preventing human harm from illicit material in dirty bombs or from contamination. In the case of a single mobile radiation detector, there are numerous challenges to overcome such as weak source intensity, multiple sources, background radiation, and the presence of obstructions, i.e., a non-convex environment. In this work, we investigate the sequential decision making capability of deep reinforcement learning in the nuclear source search context. A novel neural network architecture (RAD-A2C) based on the advantage actor critic (A2C) framework and a particle filter gated recurrent unit for …