Deep Reinforcement Learning for Navigation via Multi-Modal Belief State Representation from LiDAR and Depth Sensors

This paper presents a deep reinforcement learning framework for autonomous navigation based on multi-modal belief state representation learned from LiDAR and depth sensors. To address the challenges posed by partial observability and sensor-specific uncertainty, we propose a probabilistic representation module that models belief states as Gaussian distributions over latent environmental features. Sensor-specific encoders extract structured features from raw LiDAR and depth inputs, which are fused using a Q-value-guided weighting scheme derived from the policy critic. A motion-prediction pretraining strategy and a cross-modal coherence loss are introduced to enhance the alignment and reliability of the learned belief states. The resulting representation is integrated into a Soft Actor–Critic (SAC) framework to enable policy-driven decision-making under uncertainty. Extensive experiments in simulated environments demonstrate that the proposed method improves success rate, navigation efficiency, and generalization. Real-world experiments further validate these findings, with the proposed method outperforming a classical navigation baseline by reducing average travel time by 16% and path length by 4%. These results support the use of probabilistic multi-modal belief modeling for autonomous navigation under partial observability.