Title: Deictic Image Maps: An Abstraction For Learning Pose Invariant Manipulation Policies,
Abstract: In applications of deep reinforcement learning to robotics, it is often the
case that we want to learn pose invariant policies: policies that are invariant
to changes in the position and orientation of objects in the world. For
example, consider a peg-in-hole insertion task. If the agent learns to insert a
peg into one hole, we would like that policy to generalize to holes presented
in different poses. Unfortunately, this is a challenge using conventional
methods. This paper proposes a novel state and action abstraction that is
invariant to pose shifts called \textit{deictic image maps} that can be used
with deep reinforcement learning. We provide broad conditions under which
optimal abstract policies are optimal for the underlying system. Finally, we
show that the method can help solve challenging robotic manipulation problems.