Deep active localization
Mobile robots have made significant advances in recent decades and are now able to perform tasks that were once thought to be impossible. One critical factor that has enabled robots to perform these various challenging tasks is their ability to determine where they are located in a given environment (localization). Further automation is achieved by letting the robot choose its own actions instead of a human teleoperating it. However, determining its pose (position + orientation) precisely and scaling this capability to larger environments has been a long-standing challenge in the field of mobile robotics. Traditional approaches to this task of active localization use an information-theoretic criterion for action selection and hand-crafted perceptual models. With a steady rise in available computation in the last three decades, the back-propagation algorithm found its use in much deeper neural networks and in numerous applications. When labelled data is not available, the paradigm of reinforcement learning (RL) is used, where it learns by interacting with the environment. However, it is impractical for most RL algorithms to learn reasonably well from just the limited real world experience. Hence, it is common practice to train the RL based models in a simulator and efficiently transfer (without any significant loss of performance) these trained models into real robots. In this thesis, we propose an end-to-end differentiable method for learning to take in- formative actions for robot localization that is trainable entirely in simulation and then transferable onto real robot hardware with zero refinement. This is achieved by leveraging recent advancements in deep learning and reinforcement learning combined with domain randomization techniques. The system is composed of two learned modules: a convolu- tional neural network for perception, and a deep reinforcement learned planning module. We leverage a multi-scale approach in the perceptual model since the accuracy needed to take actions using reinforcement learning is much less than the accuracy needed for robot control. We demonstrate that the resulting system outperforms traditional approaches for either perception or planning. We also demonstrate our approach’s robustness to different map configurations and other nuisance parameters through the use of domain randomization in training. The code has been released: https://github.com/montrealrobotics/dal and is compatible with the OpenAI gym framework, as well as the Gazebo simulator.
Localization Deep Learning Reinforcement Learning Active Localization Robotics