In order to enable microaerial vehicles (MAVs) to assist in complex, unknown, unstructured environments, they must be able to navigate with guaranteed safety, even when faced with a cluttered environment they have no prior knowledge of. While trajectory-optimization-based local planners have been shown to perform well in these cases, prior work either does not address how to deal with local minima in the optimization problem or solves it by using an optimistic global planner. We present a conservative trajectory-optimization-based local planner, coupled with a local exploration strategy that selects intermediate goals. We perform extensive simulations to show that this system performs better than the standard approach of using an optimistic global planner and also outperforms doing a single exploration step when the local planner is stuck. The method is validated through experiments in a variety of highly cluttered environments including a dense forest. These experiments show the complete system running in real time fully onboard an MAV, mapping and replanning at 4 Hz.
The goal of exploration literature is not only to stay safe and avoid collisions, but to maximize the amount of information about the environment. There are many different approaches, such as greedily tracking the closest unexplored frontier @cite_16 or simulating gas-like particles throughout the environment to find the sparsest area of dispersion to explore @cite_6 .
@cite_16 @cite_6
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In environments with uncertain dynamics exploration is necessary to learn how to perform well. Existing reinforcement learning algorithms provide strong exploration guarantees, but they tend to rely on an ergodicity assumption. The essence of ergodicity is that any state is eventually reachable from any other state by following a suitable policy. This assumption allows for exploration algorithms that operate by simply favoring states that have rarely been visited before. For most physical systems this assumption is impractical as the systems would break before any reasonable exploration has taken place, i.e., most physical systems don't satisfy the ergodicity assumption. In this paper we address the need for safe exploration methods in Markov decision processes. We first propose a general formulation of safety through ergodicity. We show that imposing safety by restricting attention to the resulting set of guaranteed safe policies is NP-hard. We then present an efficient algorithm for guaranteed safe, but potentially suboptimal, exploration. At the core is an optimization formulation in which the constraints restrict attention to a subset of the guaranteed safe policies and the objective favors exploration policies. Our framework is compatible with the majority of previously proposed exploration methods, which rely on an exploration bonus. Our experiments, which include a Martian terrain exploration problem, show that our method is able to explore better than classical exploration methods. In this paper, the problem of safe exploration in the active learning context is considered. Safe exploration is especially important for data sampling from technical and industrial systems, e.g. combustion engines and gas turbines, where critical and unsafe measurements need to be avoided. The objective is to learn data-based regression models from such technical systems using a limited budget of measured, i.e. labelled, points while ensuring that critical regions of the considered systems are avoided during measurements. We propose an approach for learning such models and exploring new data regions based on Gaussian processes GP's. In particular, we employ a problem specific GP classifier to identify safe and unsafe regions, while using a differential entropy criterion for exploring relevant data regions. A theoretical analysis is shown for the proposed algorithm, where we provide an upper bound for the probability of failure. To demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of our safe exploration scheme in the active learning setting, we test the approach on a policy exploration task for the inverse pendulum hold up problem. Exploration is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Many current exploration methods for deep RL use task-agnostic objectives, such as information gain or bonuses based on state visitation. However, many practical applications of RL involve learning more than a single task, and prior tasks can be used to inform how exploration should be performed in new tasks. In this work, we study how prior tasks can inform an agent about how to explore effectively in new situations. We introduce a novel gradient-based fast adaptation algorithm -- model agnostic exploration with structured noise (MAESN) -- to learn exploration strategies from prior experience. The prior experience is used both to initialize a policy and to acquire a latent exploration space that can inject structured stochasticity into a policy, producing exploration strategies that are informed by prior knowledge and are more effective than random action-space noise. We show that MAESN is more effective at learning exploration strategies when compared to prior meta-RL methods, RL without learned exploration strategies, and task-agnostic exploration methods. We evaluate our method on a variety of simulated tasks: locomotion with a wheeled robot, locomotion with a quadrupedal walker, and object manipulation. Intrinsically motivated goal exploration processes enable agents to autonomously sample goals to explore efficiently complex environments with high-dimensional continuous actions. They have been applied successfully to real world robots to discover repertoires of policies producing a wide diversity of effects. Often these algorithms relied on engineered goal spaces but it was recently shown that one can use deep representation learning algorithms to learn an adequate goal space in simple environments. However, in the case of more complex environments containing multiple objects or distractors, an efficient exploration requires that the structure of the goal space reflects the one of the environment. In this paper we show that using a disentangled goal space leads to better exploration performances than an entangled goal space. We further show that when the representation is disentangled, one can leverage it by sampling goals that maximize learning progress in a modular manner. Finally, we show that the measure of learning progress, used to drive curiosity-driven exploration, can be used simultaneously to discover abstract independently controllable features of the environment. The code used in the experiments is available at https: github.com flowersteam Curiosity_Driven_Goal_Exploration.