Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Intelligent Robot Navigation in Dynamic Environments

Abstract

Intelligent robot navigation in dynamic environments remains one of the most challenging problems in autonomous robotics because navigation systems must continuously perceive environmental changes, predict moving obstacles, and generate safe trajectories while maintaining operational efficiency. Traditional navigation approaches, including graph-based path planning, rule-based obstacle avoidance, and probabilistic localization, often exhibit limited adaptability when environmental conditions change rapidly. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), have enabled autonomous robots to learn navigation policies directly from environmental interactions without relying exclusively on handcrafted rules. DRL integrates perception, decision-making, and continuous learning into a unified framework, making it particularly suitable for complex and uncertain environments such as warehouses, hospitals, manufacturing plants, urban streets, and disaster-response scenarios. This research-review paper presents a comprehensive analysis of Deep Reinforcement Learning-based intelligent robot navigation with emphasis on dynamic obstacle avoidance, adaptive path planning, perception integration, reward optimization, and policy learning. The paper synthesizes contemporary studies related to artificial intelligence, semantic decision intelligence, cyber-physical systems, cloud intelligence, autonomous optimization, and intelligent infrastructure to establish a multidisciplinary understanding of modern robotic navigation. Particular attention is devoted to semantic AI-enabled decision intelligence, which enhances contextual understanding during navigation and improves policy robustness in continuously evolving environments (Goyal, 2025). A conceptual DRL navigation framework is proposed comprising environmental perception, state representation, policy optimization, experience replay, reward engineering, semantic reasoning, and adaptive trajectory generation. The framework demonstrates how semantic knowledge, sensor fusion, and reinforcement learning cooperate to produce robust navigation strategies under uncertainty. Furthermore, the paper evaluates challenges involving sparse rewards, safety constraints, computational complexity, sim-to-real transfer, multi-agent coordination, and real-time deployment.