We consider the task of controlling a quadrotor to hover in front of a freely moving user, using input data from an onboard camera. On this specific task we compare two widespread learning paradigms: a mediated approach, which learns a high-level state from the input and then uses it for deriving control signals; and an end-to-end approach, which skips high-level state estimation altogether. We show that despite their fundamental difference, both approaches yield equivalent performance on this task. We finally qualitatively analyze the behavior of a quadrotor implementing such approaches.
Supervised end-to-end approaches have been successfully applied to a variety of challenging control scenarios: off-road obstacle avoidance @cite_33 @cite_12 ; autonomous driving @cite_2 @cite_7 @cite_22 @cite_23 @cite_27 ; vision-based manipulation @cite_14 ; quadrotor control in forested environments @cite_0 @cite_16 @cite_28 , cities @cite_15 @cite_1 , and cluttered environments @cite_19 .
@cite_14 @cite_22 @cite_7 @cite_33 @cite_28 @cite_1 @cite_0 @cite_19 @cite_27 @cite_23 @cite_2 @cite_15 @cite_16 @cite_12
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End-to-end control for robot manipulation and grasping is emerging as an attractive alternative to traditional pipelined approaches. However, end-to-end methods tend to either be slow to train, exhibit little or no generalisability, or lack the ability to accomplish long-horizon or multi-stage tasks. In this paper, we show how two simple techniques can lead to end-to-end (image to velocity) execution of a multi-stage task, which is analogous to a simple tidying routine, without having seen a single real image. This involves locating, reaching for, and grasping a cube, then locating a basket and dropping the cube inside. To achieve this, robot trajectories are computed in a simulator, to collect a series of control velocities which accomplish the task. Then, a CNN is trained to map observed images to velocities, using domain randomisation to enable generalisation to real world images. Results show that we are able to successfully accomplish the task in the real world with the ability to generalise to novel environments, including those with dynamic lighting conditions, distractor objects, and moving objects, including the basket itself. We believe our approach to be simple, highly scalable, and capable of learning long-horizon tasks that have until now not been shown with the state-of-the-art in end-to-end robot control. Autonomous urban driving navigation with complex multi-agent dynamics is under-explored due to the difficulty of learning an optimal driving policy. The traditional modular pipeline heavily relies on hand-designed rules and the pre-processing perception system while the supervised learning-based models are limited by the accessibility of extensive human experience. We present a general and principled Controllable Imitative Reinforcement Learning (CIRL) approach which successfully makes the driving agent achieve higher success rates based on only vision inputs in a high-fidelity car simulator. To alleviate the low exploration efficiency for large continuous action space that often prohibits the use of classical RL on challenging real tasks, our CIRL explores over a reasonably constrained action space guided by encoded experiences that imitate human demonstrations, building upon Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG). Moreover, we propose to specialize adaptive policies and steering-angle reward designs for different control signals (i.e. follow, straight, turn right, turn left) based on the shared representations to improve the model capability in tackling with diverse cases. Extensive experiments on CARLA driving benchmark demonstrate that CIRL substantially outperforms all previous methods in terms of the percentage of successfully completed episodes on a variety of goal-directed driving tasks. We also show its superior generalization capability in unseen environments. To our knowledge, this is the first successful case of the learned driving policy by reinforcement learning in the high-fidelity simulator, which performs better than supervised imitation learning. Safe autonomous navigation of microair vehicles in cluttered dynamic environments is challenging due to the uncertainties arising from robot localization, sensing, and motion disturbances. This letter presents a probabilistic collision avoidance method for navigation among other robots and moving obstacles, such as humans. The approach explicitly considers the collision probability between each robot and obstacle and formulates a chance constrained nonlinear model predictive control problem (CCNMPC). A tight bound for approximation of collision probability is developed, which makes the CCNMPC formulation tractable and solvable in real time. For multirobot coordination, we describe three approaches, one distributed without communication (constant velocity assumption), one distributed with communication (of previous plans), and one centralized (sequential planning). We evaluate the proposed method in experiments with two quadrotors sharing the space with two humans and verify the multirobot coordination strategy in simulation with up to sixteen quadrotors. One way to approach end-to-end autonomous driving is to learn a policy function that maps from a sensory input, such as an image frame from a front-facing camera, to a driving action, by imitating an expert driver, or a reference policy. This can be done by supervised learning, where a policy function is tuned to minimize the difference between the predicted and ground-truth actions. A policy function trained in this way however is known to suffer from unexpected behaviours due to the mismatch between the states reachable by the reference policy and trained policy functions. More advanced algorithms for imitation learning, such as DAgger, addresses this issue by iteratively collecting training examples from both reference and trained policies. These algorithms often requires a large number of queries to a reference policy, which is undesirable as the reference policy is often expensive. In this paper, we propose an extension of the DAgger, called SafeDAgger, that is query-efficient and more suitable for end-to-end autonomous driving. We evaluate the proposed SafeDAgger in a car racing simulator and show that it indeed requires less queries to a reference policy. We observe a significant speed up in convergence, which we conjecture to be due to the effect of automated curriculum learning.