Title: Smooth and Efficient Policy Exploration for Robot Trajectory Learning,
Abstract: Many policy search algorithms have been proposed for robot learning and
proved to be practical in real robot applications. However, there are still
hyperparameters in the algorithms, such as the exploration rate, which requires
manual tuning. The existing methods to design the exploration rate manually or
automatically may not be general enough or hard to apply in the real robot. In
this paper, we propose a learning model to update the exploration rate
adaptively. The overall algorithm is a combination of methods proposed by other
researchers. Smooth trajectories for the robot can be produced by the algorithm
and the updated exploration rate maximizes the lower bound of the expected
return. Our method is tested in the ball-in-cup problem. The results show that
our method can receive the same learning outcome as the previous methods but
with fewer iterations.