1,474 research outputs found
Feature Reinforcement Learning: Part I: Unstructured MDPs
General-purpose, intelligent, learning agents cycle through sequences of
observations, actions, and rewards that are complex, uncertain, unknown, and
non-Markovian. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for
small finite state Markov decision processes (MDPs). Up to now, extracting the
right state representations out of bare observations, that is, reducing the
general agent setup to the MDP framework, is an art that involves significant
effort by designers. The primary goal of this work is to automate the reduction
process and thereby significantly expand the scope of many existing
reinforcement learning algorithms and the agents that employ them. Before we
can think of mechanizing this search for suitable MDPs, we need a formal
objective criterion. The main contribution of this article is to develop such a
criterion. I also integrate the various parts into one learning algorithm.
Extensions to more realistic dynamic Bayesian networks are developed in Part
II. The role of POMDPs is also considered there.Comment: 24 LaTeX pages, 5 diagram
Feature Markov Decision Processes
General purpose intelligent learning agents cycle through (complex,non-MDP)
sequences of observations, actions, and rewards. On the other hand,
reinforcement learning is well-developed for small finite state Markov Decision
Processes (MDPs). So far it is an art performed by human designers to extract
the right state representation out of the bare observations, i.e. to reduce the
agent setup to the MDP framework. Before we can think of mechanizing this
search for suitable MDPs, we need a formal objective criterion. The main
contribution of this article is to develop such a criterion. I also integrate
the various parts into one learning algorithm. Extensions to more realistic
dynamic Bayesian networks are developed in a companion article.Comment: 7 page
Using Monte Carlo Search With Data Aggregation to Improve Robot Soccer Policies
RoboCup soccer competitions are considered among the most challenging
multi-robot adversarial environments, due to their high dynamism and the
partial observability of the environment. In this paper we introduce a method
based on a combination of Monte Carlo search and data aggregation (MCSDA) to
adapt discrete-action soccer policies for a defender robot to the strategy of
the opponent team. By exploiting a simple representation of the domain, a
supervised learning algorithm is trained over an initial collection of data
consisting of several simulations of human expert policies. Monte Carlo policy
rollouts are then generated and aggregated to previous data to improve the
learned policy over multiple epochs and games. The proposed approach has been
extensively tested both on a soccer-dedicated simulator and on real robots.
Using this method, our learning robot soccer team achieves an improvement in
ball interceptions, as well as a reduction in the number of opponents' goals.
Together with a better performance, an overall more efficient positioning of
the whole team within the field is achieved
Towards Optimally Decentralized Multi-Robot Collision Avoidance via Deep Reinforcement Learning
Developing a safe and efficient collision avoidance policy for multiple
robots is challenging in the decentralized scenarios where each robot generate
its paths without observing other robots' states and intents. While other
distributed multi-robot collision avoidance systems exist, they often require
extracting agent-level features to plan a local collision-free action, which
can be computationally prohibitive and not robust. More importantly, in
practice the performance of these methods are much lower than their centralized
counterparts.
We present a decentralized sensor-level collision avoidance policy for
multi-robot systems, which directly maps raw sensor measurements to an agent's
steering commands in terms of movement velocity. As a first step toward
reducing the performance gap between decentralized and centralized methods, we
present a multi-scenario multi-stage training framework to find an optimal
policy which is trained over a large number of robots on rich, complex
environments simultaneously using a policy gradient based reinforcement
learning algorithm. We validate the learned sensor-level collision avoidance
policy in a variety of simulated scenarios with thorough performance
evaluations and show that the final learned policy is able to find time
efficient, collision-free paths for a large-scale robot system. We also
demonstrate that the learned policy can be well generalized to new scenarios
that do not appear in the entire training period, including navigating a
heterogeneous group of robots and a large-scale scenario with 100 robots.
Videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/drlmac
Robotic manipulation of multiple objects as a POMDP
This paper investigates manipulation of multiple unknown objects in a crowded
environment. Because of incomplete knowledge due to unknown objects and
occlusions in visual observations, object observations are imperfect and action
success is uncertain, making planning challenging. We model the problem as a
partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), which allows a general
reward based optimization objective and takes uncertainty in temporal evolution
and partial observations into account. In addition to occlusion dependent
observation and action success probabilities, our POMDP model also
automatically adapts object specific action success probabilities. To cope with
the changing system dynamics and performance constraints, we present a new
online POMDP method based on particle filtering that produces compact policies.
The approach is validated both in simulation and in physical experiments in a
scenario of moving dirty dishes into a dishwasher. The results indicate that:
1) a greedy heuristic manipulation approach is not sufficient, multi-object
manipulation requires multi-step POMDP planning, and 2) on-line planning is
beneficial since it allows the adaptation of the system dynamics model based on
actual experience
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