Leveraging the efficiency of multi-task robot manipulation via task-evoked planner and reinforcement learning

Haofu Qian, Haoyang Zhang, Jun Shao, Jiatao Zhang, Jason Gu, Wei Song, Shiqiang Zhu

Abstract: Multi-task learning has expanded the boundaries of robotic manipulation, enabling the execution of increasingly complex tasks. However, policies learned through reinforcement learning exhibit limited generalization and narrow distributions, which restrict their effectiveness in multi-task training. Addressing the challenge of obtaining policies with generalization and stability represents a non-trivial problem. To tackle this issue, we propose a planning-guided reinforcement learning method. It leverages a task-evoked planner(TEP) and a reinforcement learning approach with planner’s guidance. TEP utilizes reusable samples as the source, with the aim of learning reachability information across different task scenarios. Then in reinforcement learning, TEP assesses and guides the Actor towards better outputs and smoothly enhances the performance in multi-task benchmarks. We evaluate this approach within the Meta-World framework and compare it with prior works in terms of learning efficiency and effectiveness. Depending on experimental results, our method has more efficiency, higher success rates, and demonstrates more realistic behavior.