Research on multi-robot systems has demonstrated promising results in manifold applications and domains. Still, efficiently learning an effective robot behaviors is very difficult, due to unstructured scenarios, high uncertainties, and large state dimensionality (e.g. hyper-redundant and groups of robot). To alleviate this problem, we present Q-CP a cooperative model-based reinforcement learning algorithm, which exploits action values to both (1) guide the exploration of the state space and (2) generate effective policies. Specifically, we exploit Q-learning to attack the curse-of-dimensionality in the iterations of a Monte-Carlo Tree Search. We implement and evaluate Q-CP on different stochastic cooperative (general-sum) games: (1) a simple cooperative navigation problem among 3 robots, (2) a cooperation scenario between a pair of KUKA YouBots performing hand-overs, and (3) a coordination task between two mobile robots entering a door. The obtained results show the effectiveness of Q-CP in the chosen applications, where action values drive the exploration and reduce the computational demand of the planning process while achieving good performance.
Similar to TD-search @cite_4 , we aim at reducing the variance of value estimates during the search procedure by means of temporal difference learning. However, we improve our model by preserving the selective search of Monte-Carlo algorithms, when bootstrapping is ongoing. Specifically, extends TD-search by constructing upper confidence bounds on the value function, and by selecting optimistically with respect to those, instead of performing @math -greedy exploration. In this way, explores more informative portions of the search space @cite_17 @cite_9 , and supports the generation of competitive policies -- with the additional benefit of a reduction in (1) number of simulations (or expanded nodes), and (2) exploration of the search space -- that alleviates the curse-of-dimensionality.
@cite_9 @cite_4 @cite_17
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We consider a framework for structured prediction based on search in the space of complete structured outputs. Given a structured input, an output is produced by running a time-bounded search procedure guided by a learned cost function, and then returning the least cost output uncovered during the search. This framework can be instantiated for a wide range of search spaces and search procedures, and easily incorporates arbitrary structured-prediction loss functions. In this paper, we make two main technical contributions. First, we describe a novel approach to automatically defining an effective search space over structured outputs, which is able to leverage the availability of powerful classification learning algorithms. In particular, we define the limited-discrepancy search space and relate the quality of that space to the quality of learned classifiers. We also define a sparse version of the search space to improve the effciency of our overall approach. Second, we give a generic cost function learning approach that is applicable to a wide range of search procedures. The key idea is to learn a cost function that attempts to mimic the behavior of conducting searches guided by the true loss function. Our experiments on six benchmark domains show that a small amount of search in limited discrepancy search space is often sufficient for significantly improving on state-of-the-art structured-prediction performance. We also demonstrate significant speed improvements for our approach using sparse search spaces with little or no loss in accuracy. This work proposes a process for efficiently searching over combinations of individual object 6D pose hypotheses in cluttered scenes, especially in cases involving occlusions and objects resting on each other. The initial set of candidate object poses is generated from state-of-the-art object detection and global point cloud registration techniques. The best-scored pose per object by using these techniques may not be accurate due to overlaps and occlusions. Nevertheless, experimental indications provided in this work show that object poses with lower ranks may be closer to the real poses than ones with high ranks according to registration techniques. This motivates a global optimization process for improving these poses by taking into account scene-level physical interactions between objects. It also implies that the Cartesian product of candidate poses for interacting objects must be searched so as to identify the best scene-level hypothesis. To perform the search efficiently, the candidate poses for each object are clustered so as to reduce their number but still keep a sufficient diversity. Then, searching over the combinations of candidate object poses is performed through a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) process that uses the similarity between the observed depth image of the scene and a rendering of the scene given the hypothesized pose as a score that guides the search procedure. MCTS handles in a principled way the tradeoff between fine-tuning the most promising poses and exploring new ones, by using the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) technique. Experimental results indicate that this process is able to quickly identify in cluttered scenes physically-consistent object poses that are significantly closer to ground truth compared to poses found by point cloud registration methods. The use of automated subset search algorithms is reviewed and issues concerning model selection and selection criteria are discussed. In addition, a Monte Carlo study is reported which presents data regarding the frequency with which authentic and noise variables are selected by automated subset algorithms. In particular, the effects of the correlation between predictor variables, the number of candidate predictor variables, the size of the sample, and the level of significance for entry and deletion of variables were studied for three automated subset algorithms: BACKWARD ELIMINATION, FORWARD SELECTION, and STEPWISE. Results indicated that: (1) the degree of correlation between the predictor variables affected the frequency with which authentic predictor variables found their way into the final model; (2) the number of candidate predictor variables affected the number of noise variables that gained entry to the model; (3) the size of the sample was of little practical importance in determining the number of authentic variables contained in the final model; and (4) the population multiple coefficient of determination could be faithfully estimated by adopting a statistic that is adjusted by the total number of candidate predictor variables rather than the number of variables in the final model. Monte-Carlo Tree Search is a sampling-based search algorithm that has been successfully applied to a variety of games. Monte-Carlo rollouts allow it to take distant consequences of moves into account, giving it a strategic advantage in many domains over traditional depth-limited minimax search with alpha-beta pruning. However, MCTS builds a highly selective tree and can therefore miss crucial moves and fall into traps in tactical situations. Full-width minimax search does not suffer from this weakness. This paper proposes MCTS-minimax hybrids that employ shallow minimax searches within the MCTS framework. The three proposed approaches use minimax in the selection expansion phase, the rollout phase, and the backpropagation phase of MCTS. Without requiring domain knowledge in the form of evaluation functions, these hybrid algorithms are a first step at combining the strategic strength of MCTS and the tactical strength of minimax. We investigate their effectiveness in the test domains of Connect-4 and Breakthrough.