Behaviour cloning is a commonly used strategy for imitation learning and can be extremely effective in constrained domains. However, in cases where the dynamics of an environment may be state dependent and varying, behaviour cloning places a burden on model capacity and the number of demonstrations required. This paper introduces switching density networks, which rely on a categorical reparametrisation for hybrid system identification. This results in a network comprising a classification layer that is followed by a regression layer. We use switching density networks to predict the parameters of hybrid control laws, which are toggled by a switching layer to produce different controller outputs, when conditioned on an input state. This work shows how switching density networks can be used for hybrid system identification in a variety of tasks, successfully identifying the key joint angle goals that make up manipulation tasks, while simultaneously learning image-based goal classifiers and regression networks that predict joint angles from images. We also show that they can cluster the phase space of an inverted pendulum, identifying the balance, spin and pump controllers required to solve this task. Switching density networks can be difficult to train, but we introduce a cross entropy regularisation loss that stabilises training.
Policy search methods can allow robots to learn control policies for a wide range of tasks, but practical applications of policy search often require hand-engineered components for perception, state estimation, and low-level control. In this paper, we aim to answer the following question: does training the perception and control systems jointly end-to-end provide better performance than training each component separately? To this end, we develop a method that can be used to learn policies that map raw image observations directly to torques at the robot's motors. The policies are represented by deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with 92,000 parameters, and are trained using a guided policy search method, which transforms policy search into supervised learning, with supervision provided by a simple trajectory-centric reinforcement learning method. We evaluate our method on a range of real-world manipulation tasks that require close coordination between vision and control, such as screwing a cap onto a bottle, and present simulated comparisons to a range of prior policy search methods.  We propose a general deep reinforcement learning method and apply it to robot manipulation tasks. Our approach leverages demonstration data to assist a reinforcement learning agent in learning to solve a wide range of tasks, mainly previously unsolved. We train visuomotor policies end-to-end to learn a direct mapping from RGB camera inputs to joint velocities. Our experiments indicate that our reinforcement and imitation approach can solve contact-rich robot manipulation tasks that neither the state-of-the-art reinforcement nor imitation learning method can solve alone. We also illustrate that these policies achieved zero-shot sim2real transfer by training with large visual and dynamics variations. While deep reinforcement learning has successfully solved many challenging control tasks, its real-world applicability has been limited by the inability to ensure the safety of learned policies. We propose an approach to verifiable reinforcement learning by training decision tree policies, which can represent complex policies (since they are nonparametric), yet can be efficiently verified using existing techniques (since they are highly structured). The challenge is that decision tree policies are difficult to train. We propose VIPER, an algorithm that combines ideas from model compression and imitation learning to learn decision tree policies guided by a DNN policy (called the oracle) and its Q-function, and show that it substantially outperforms two baselines. We use VIPER to (i) learn a provably robust decision tree policy for a variant of Atari Pong with a symbolic state space, (ii) learn a decision tree policy for a toy game based on Pong that provably never loses, and (iii) learn a provably stable decision tree policy for cart-pole. In each case, the decision tree policy achieves performance equal to that of the original DNN policy. Dexterous multi-fingered hands are extremely versatile and provide a generic way to perform multiple tasks in human-centric environments. However, effectively controlling them remains challenging due to their high dimensionality and large number of potential contacts. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) provides a model-agnostic approach to control complex dynamical systems, but has not been shown to scale to high-dimensional dexterous manipulation. Furthermore, deployment of DRL on physical systems remains challenging due to sample inefficiency. Thus, the success of DRL in robotics has thus far been limited to simpler manipulators and tasks. In this work, we show that model-free DRL with natural policy gradients can effectively scale up to complex manipulation tasks with a high-dimensional 24-DoF hand, and solve them from scratch in simulated experiments. Furthermore, with the use of a small number of human demonstrations, the sample complexity can be significantly reduced, and enable learning within the equivalent of a few hours of robot experience. We demonstrate successful policies for multiple complex tasks: object relocation, in-hand manipulation, tool use, and door opening.