Zero-Shot Wireless Indoor Navigation through Physics-Informed Reinforcement Learning

The growing focus on indoor robot navigation utilizing wireless signals has stemmed from the capability of these signals to capture high-resolution angular and temporal measurements. Prior heuristic-based methods, based on radio frequency (RF) propagation, are intuitive and generalizable across simple scenarios, yet fail to navigate in complex environments. On the other hand, end-to-end (e2e) deep reinforcement learning (RL) can explore a rich class of policies, delivering surprising performance when facing complex wireless environments. However, the price to pay is the astronomical amount of training samples, and the resulting policy, without fine-tuning (zero-shot), is unable to navigate efficiently in new scenarios unseen in the training phase. To equip the navigation agent with sample-efficient learning and zero-shot generalization, this work proposes a novel physics-informed RL (PIRL) where a distance-to-target-based cost (standard in e2e) is augmented with physics-informed reward shaping. The key intuition is that wireless environments vary, but physics laws persist. After learning to utilize the physics information, the agent can transfer this knowledge across different tasks and navigate in an unknown environment without fine-tuning. The proposed PIRL is evaluated using a wireless digital twin (WDT) built upon simulations of a large class of indoor environments from the AI Habitat dataset augmented with electromagnetic radiation simulation for wireless signals. It is shown that the PIRL significantly outperforms both e2e RL and heuristic-based solutions in terms of generalization and performance. Source code is available at https://github.com/Panshark/PIRL-WIN. © 2024 IEEE.