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Makale: Learning Visual Feature Spaces for Robotic Manipulation with Deep Spatial Autoencoders

Reinforcement learning provides a powerful and flexible framework for automated acquisition of robotic motion skills. However, applying reinforcement learning requires a sufficiently detailed representation of the state, including the configuration of task-relevant objects. We present an approach that automates state-space construction by learning a state representation directly from camera images. Our method uses a deep spatial autoencoder to acquire a set of feature points that describe the environment for the current task, such as the positions of objects, and then learns a motion skill with these feature points using an efficient reinforcement learning method based on local linear models. The resulting controller reacts continuously to the learned feature points, allowing the robot to dynamically manipulate objects in the world with closed-loop control. We demonstrate our method with a PR2 robot on tasks that include pushing a free-standing toy block, picking up a bag of rice using a spatula, and hanging a loop of rope on a hook at various positions. In each task, our method automatically learns to track task-relevant objects and manipulate their configuration with the robot’s arm.

Makale: Learning Deep Control Policies for Autonomous Aerial Vehicles with MPC-Guided Policy Search

Model predictive control (MPC) is an effective method for controlling robotic systems, particularly autonomous aerial vehicles such as quadcopters. However, application of MPC can be computationally demanding, and typically requires estimating the state of the system, which can be challenging in complex, unstructured environments. Reinforcement learning can in principle forego the need for explicit state estimation and acquire a policy that directly maps sensor readings to actions, but is difficult to apply to underactuated systems that are liable to fail catastrophically during training, before an effective policy has been found. We propose to combine MPC with reinforcement learning in the framework of guided policy search, where MPC is used to generate data at training time, under full state observations provided by an instrumented training environment. This data is used to train a deep neural network policy, which is allowed to access only the raw observations from the vehicle’s onboard sensors. After training, the neural network policy can successfully control the robot without knowledge of the full state, and at a fraction of the computational cost of MPC. We evaluate our method by learning obstacle avoidance policies for a simulated quadrotor, using simulated onboard sensors and no explicit state estimation at test time.