Parallel Implementation of Reinforcement Learning Q-Learning Technique for FPGA

Q-learning is an off-policy reinforcement learning technique, which has the main advantage of obtaining an optimal policy interacting with an unknown model environment. This paper proposes a parallel fixed-point Q-learning algorithm architecture implemented on field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) focusing on optimizing the system processing time. The convergence results are presented, and the processing time and occupied area were analyzed for different states and actions sizes scenarios and various fixed-point formats. The studies concerning the accuracy of the Q-learning technique response and resolution error associated with a decrease in the number of bits were also carried out for hardware implementation. The architecture implementation details were featured. The entire project was developed using the system generator platform (Xilinx), with a Virtex-6 xc6vcx240t-1ff1156 as the target FPGA

Towards Hardware Accelerated Reinforcement Learning for Application-Specific Robotic Control

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an area of machine learning in which an agent interacts with the environment by making sequential decisions. The agent receives reward from the environment based on how good the decisions are and tries to find an optimal decision-making policy that maximises its longterm cumulative reward. This paper presents a novel approach which has showon promise in applying accelerated simulation of RL policy training to automating the control of a real robot arm for specific applications. The approach has two steps. First, design space exploration techniques are developed to enhance performance of an FPGA accelerator for RL policy training based on Trust Region Policy Optimisation (TRPO), which results in a 43% speed improvement over a previous FPGA implementation, while achieving 4.65 times speed up against deep learning libraries running on GPU and 19.29 times speed up against CPU. Second, the trained RL policy is transferred to a real robot arm. Our experiments show that the trained arm can successfully reach to and pick up predefined objects, demonstrating the feasibility of our approach