In this paper we focus on developing a control algorithm for multi-terrain tracked robots with flippers using a reinforcement learning (RL) approach. The work is based on the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm, proven to be very successful in simple simulation environments. The algorithm works in an end-to-end fashion in order to control the continuous position of the flippers. This end-to-end approach makes it easy to apply the controller to a wide array of circumstances, but the huge flexibility comes to the cost of an increased difficulty of solution. The complexity of the task is enlarged even more by the fact that real multi-terrain robots move in partially observable environments. Notwithstanding these complications, being able to smoothly control a multi-terrain robot can produce huge benefits in impaired people daily lives or in search and rescue situations.
When solving complex problems with rl , having the algorithm converge can be tricky. To solve this issue many tricks have been developed, like the use of Replay Memory @cite_2 and auxiliary target networks @cite_3 . Another trick used in @cite_0 is to give the agent other auxiliary tasks, which differ from the main goal, to solve; this pushes the agent to explore more, thus leading to better solutions.
@cite_0 @cite_3 @cite_2
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Learning to navigate in complex environments with dynamic elements is an important milestone in developing AI agents. In this work we formulate the navigation question as a reinforcement learning problem and show that data efficiency and task performance can be dramatically improved by relying on additional auxiliary tasks leveraging multimodal sensory inputs. In particular we consider jointly learning the goal-driven reinforcement learning problem with auxiliary depth prediction and loop closure classification tasks. This approach can learn to navigate from raw sensory input in complicated 3D mazes, approaching human-level performance even under conditions where the goal location changes frequently. We provide detailed analysis of the agent behaviour, its ability to localise, and its network activity dynamics, showing that the agent implicitly learns key navigation abilities. An artificial agent is developed that learns to play a diverse range of classic Atari 2600 computer games directly from sensory experience, achieving a performance comparable to that of an expert human player; this work paves the way to building general-purpose learning algorithms that bridge the divide between perception and action. We present the first deep learning model to successfully learn control policies directly from high-dimensional sensory input using reinforcement learning. The model is a convolutional neural network, trained with a variant of Q-learning, whose input is raw pixels and whose output is a value function estimating future rewards. We apply our method to seven Atari 2600 games from the Arcade Learning Environment, with no adjustment of the architecture or learning algorithm. We find that it outperforms all previous approaches on six of the games and surpasses a human expert on three of them.