Grasping an object and precisely stacking it on another is a difficult task for traditional robotic control or hand-engineered approaches. Here we examine the problem in simulation and provide techniques aimed at solving it via deep reinforcement learning. We introduce two straightforward extensions to the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm (DDPG), which make it significantly more data-efficient and scalable. Our results show that by making extensive use of off-policy data and replay, it is possible to find high-performance control policies. Further, our results hint that it may soon be feasible to train successful stacking policies by collecting interactions on real robots.
@cite_35: Dexterous multi-fingered hands can accomplish fine manipulation behaviors that are infeasible with simple robotic grippers. However, sophisticated multi-fingered hands are often expensive and fragile. Low-cost soft hands offer an appealing alternative to more conventional devices, but present considerable challenges in sensing and actuation, making them difficult to apply to more complex manipulation tasks. In this paper, we describe an approach to learning from demonstration that can be used to train soft robotic hands to perform dexterous manipulation tasks. Our method uses object-centric demonstrations, where a human demonstrates the desired motion of manipulated objects with their own hands, and the robot autonomously learns to imitate these demonstrations using reinforcement learning. We propose a novel algorithm that allows us to blend and select a subset of the most feasible demonstrations to learn to imitate on the hardware, which we use with an extension of the guided policy search framework to use multiple demonstrations to learn generalizable neural network policies. We demonstrate our approach on the RBO Hand 2, with learned motor skills for turning a valve, manipulating an abacus, and grasping.
@cite_26: In principle, reinforcement learning and policy search methods can enable robots to learn highly complex and general skills that may allow them to function amid the complexity and diversity of the real world. However, training a policy that generalizes well across a wide range of real-world conditions requires far greater quantity and diversity of experience than is practical to collect with a single robot. Fortunately, it is possible for multiple robots to share their experience with one another, and thereby, learn a policy collectively. In this work, we explore distributed and asynchronous policy learning as a means to achieve generalization and improved training times on challenging, real-world manipulation tasks. We propose a distributed and asynchronous version of Guided Policy Search and use it to demonstrate collective policy learning on a vision-based door opening task using four robots. We show that it achieves better generalization, utilization, and training times than the single robot alternative.
@cite_22: We consider the problem of imitation learning where the examples, demonstrated by an expert, cover only a small part of a large state space. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) provides an ecient tool for generalizing the demonstration, based on the assumption that the expert is optimally acting in a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Most of the past work on IRL requires that a (near)optimal policy can be computed for dierent reward functions. However, this requirement can hardly be satised in systems with a large, or continuous, state space. In this paper, we propose a model-free IRL algorithm, where the relative entropy between the empirical distribution of the state-action trajectories under a baseline policy and their distribution under the learned policy is minimized by stochastic gradient descent. We compare this new approach to well-known IRL algorithms using learned MDP models. Empirical results on simulated car racing, gridworld and ball-in-a-cup problems show that our approach is able to learn good policies from a small number of demonstrations.
@cite_9: Reinforcement learning can acquire complex behaviors from high-level specifications. However, defining a cost function that can be optimized effectively and encodes the correct task is challenging in practice. We explore how inverse optimal control (IOC) can be used to learn behaviors from demonstrations, with applications to torque control of high-dimensional robotic systems. Our method addresses two key challenges in inverse optimal control: first, the need for informative features and effective regularization to impose structure on the cost, and second, the difficulty of learning the cost function under unknown dynamics for high-dimensional continuous systems. To address the former challenge, we present an algorithm capable of learning arbitrary nonlinear cost functions, such as neural networks, without meticulous feature engineering. To address the latter challenge, we formulate an efficient sample-based approximation for MaxEnt IOC. We evaluate our method on a series of simulated tasks and real-world robotic manipulation problems, demonstrating substantial improvement over prior methods both in terms of task complexity and sample efficiency.
@cite_32: Learning complex motor skills for real world tasks is a hard problem in robotic manipulation that often requires painstaking manual tuning and design by a human expert. In this work, we present a Reinforcement Learning based approach to acquiring new motor skills from demonstration. Our approach allows the robot to learn fine manipulation skills and significantly improve its success rate and skill level starting from a possibly coarse demonstration. Our approach aims to incorporate task domain knowledge, where appropriate, by working in a space consistent with the constraints of a specific task. In addition, we also present an approach to using sensor feedback to learn a predictive model of the task outcome. This allows our system to learn the proprioceptive sensor feedback needed to monitor subsequent executions of the task online and abort execution in the event of predicted failure. We illustrate our approach using two example tasks executed with the PR2 dual-arm robot: a straight and accurate pool stroke and a box flipping task using two chopsticks as tools.
@cite_6: We present an approach to learning objective functions for robotic manipulation based on inverse reinforcement learning. Our path integral inverse reinforcement learning algorithm can deal with high-dimensional continuous state-action spaces, and only requires local optimality of demonstrated trajectories. We use L1 regularization in order to achieve feature selection, and propose an efficient algorithm to minimize the resulting convex objective function. We demonstrate our approach by applying it to two core problems in robotic manipulation. First, we learn a cost function for redundancy resolution in inverse kinematics. Second, we use our method to learn a cost function over trajectories, which is then used in optimization-based motion planning for grasping and manipulation tasks. Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous algorithms in high-dimensional settings.
@cite_19: Developing robots capable of fine manipulation skills is of major importance in order to build truly assistive robots. These robots need to be compliant in their actuation and control in order to operate safely in human environments. Manipulation tasks imply complex contact interactions with the external world, and involve reasoning about the forces and torques to be applied. Planning under contact conditions is usually impractical due to computational complexity, and a lack of precise dynamics models of the environment. We present an approach to acquiring manipulation skills on compliant robots through reinforcement learning. The initial position control policy for manipulation is initialized through kinesthetic demonstration. We augment this policy with a force torque profile to be controlled in combination with the position trajectories. We use the Policy Improvement with Path Integrals (PI2) algorithm to learn these force torque profiles by optimizing a cost function that measures task success. We demonstrate our approach on the Barrett WAM robot arm equipped with a 6-DOF force torque sensor on two different manipulation tasks: opening a door with a lever door handle, and picking up a pen off the table. We show that the learnt force control policies allow successful, robust execution of the tasks.
@cite_20: The acquisition and improvement of motor skills and control policies for robotics from trial and error is of essential importance if robots should ever leave precisely pre-structured environments. However, to date only few existing reinforcement learning methods have been scaled into the domains of high-dimensional robots such as manipulator, legged or humanoid robots. Policy gradient methods remain one of the few exceptions and have found a variety of applications. Nevertheless, the application of such methods is not without peril if done in an uninformed manner. In this paper, we give an overview on learning with policy gradient methods for robotics with a strong focus on recent advances in the field. We outline previous applications to robotics and show how the most recently developed methods can significantly improve learning performance. Finally, we evaluate our most promising algorithm in the application of hitting a baseball with an anthropomorphic arm
Finally, the use of demonstration data has played an important role in robot learning, both as a means to obtain suitable cost functions @cite_22 @cite_6 @cite_9 @cite_35 but also to bootstrap and thus speed up learning. For the latter, kinesthetic teaching is widely used @cite_20 @cite_19 @cite_32 @cite_26 . It integrates naturally with trajectory-based movement representations but the need for a human operator to be able to guide the robot through the full movement can be limiting. Furthermore, when the policy representation is not trajectory based (e.g. direct torque control with neural networks) the use of human demonstration trajectories may be less straightforward (e.g. since the associated controls are not available).