32,890 research outputs found
ViZDoom Competitions: Playing Doom from Pixels
This paper presents the first two editions of Visual Doom AI Competition,
held in 2016 and 2017. The challenge was to create bots that compete in a
multi-player deathmatch in a first-person shooter (FPS) game, Doom. The bots
had to make their decisions based solely on visual information, i.e., a raw
screen buffer. To play well, the bots needed to understand their surroundings,
navigate, explore, and handle the opponents at the same time. These aspects,
together with the competitive multi-agent aspect of the game, make the
competition a unique platform for evaluating the state of the art reinforcement
learning algorithms. The paper discusses the rules, solutions, results, and
statistics that give insight into the agents' behaviors. Best-performing agents
are described in more detail. The results of the competition lead to the
conclusion that, although reinforcement learning can produce capable Doom bots,
they still are not yet able to successfully compete against humans in this
game. The paper also revisits the ViZDoom environment, which is a flexible,
easy to use, and efficient 3D platform for research for vision-based
reinforcement learning, based on a well-recognized first-person perspective
game Doom
Modifications and Improvements to the Sea Beam System on Board R/V Thomas Washington
A number of modifications to the narrowbeam echo-sounder and echo processor of the Sea Beammultibeam bathymetric survey system have been implemented. These include the design and construction of a digital pitch compensator, the ability to use a variety of sensors for vertical reference, the design and construction of hardware test equipment, and an interface to the shipboard DEC VAX-11/730 computer for data logging, automation of start-up procedures, and performance monitorin
Learning with Training Wheels: Speeding up Training with a Simple Controller for Deep Reinforcement Learning
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been applied successfully to many
robotic applications. However, the large number of trials needed for training
is a key issue. Most of existing techniques developed to improve training
efficiency (e.g. imitation) target on general tasks rather than being tailored
for robot applications, which have their specific context to benefit from. We
propose a novel framework, Assisted Reinforcement Learning, where a classical
controller (e.g. a PID controller) is used as an alternative, switchable policy
to speed up training of DRL for local planning and navigation problems. The
core idea is that the simple control law allows the robot to rapidly learn
sensible primitives, like driving in a straight line, instead of random
exploration. As the actor network becomes more advanced, it can then take over
to perform more complex actions, like obstacle avoidance. Eventually, the
simple controller can be discarded entirely. We show that not only does this
technique train faster, it also is less sensitive to the structure of the DRL
network and consistently outperforms a standard Deep Deterministic Policy
Gradient network. We demonstrate the results in both simulation and real-world
experiments.Comment: Published in ICRA2018. The code is now available at
https://github.com/xie9187/AsDDP
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