Discovering Unsupervised Behaviours from Full State Trajectories

Luca Grillotti, Antoine Cully

Keywords: Quality-Diversity Optimisation, Unsupervised Learning, Robotics

TL;DR: Additional analysis of an Unsupervised Quality-Diversity algorithm, where the robot has to autonomously discover its abilities from full state trajectories.

Abstract: Improving open-ended learning capabilities is a promising approach to enable robots to face the unbounded complexity of the real-world. Among existing methods, the ability of Quality-Diversity algorithms to generate large collections of diverse and high-performing skills is instrumental in this context. However, most of those algorithms rely on a hand-coded behavioural descriptor to characterise the diversity, hence requiring prior knowledge about the considered tasks. In this work, we propose an additional analysis of Autonomous Robots Realising their Abilities; a Quality-Diversity algorithm that autonomously finds behavioural characterisations. We evaluate our approach on a simulated robotic environment, where the robot has to autonomously discover its abilities from its full state trajectories. All algorithms were applied to three tasks: navigation, moving forward with a high velocity, and performing half-rolls. The experimental results show that the algorithm under study discovers autonomously collections of solutions that are diverse with respect to all tasks. More specifically, our approach autonomously finds policies that make the robot move to diverse positions, but also utilise its legs in diverse ways, and even perform half-rolls.