Automated Parking Trajectory Generation Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Autonomous parking is a key technology in modern autonomous driving systems, requiring high precision, strong adaptability, and efficiency in complex environments. This paper proposes a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) framework based on the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm to optimize autonomous parking tasks. SAC, an off-policy method with entropy regularization, is particularly well-suited for continuous action spaces, enabling fine-grained vehicle control. We model the parking task as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and train an agent to maximize cumulative rewards while balancing exploration and exploitation through entropy maximization. The proposed system integrates multiple sensor inputs into a high-dimensional state space and leverages SAC's dual critic networks and policy network to achieve stable learning. Simulation results show that the SAC-based approach delivers high parking success rates, reduced maneuver times, and robust handling of dynamic obstacles, outperforming traditional rule-based methods and other DRL algorithms. This study demonstrates SAC's potential in autonomous parking and lays the foundation for real-world applications.