Smooth Exploration for Robotic Reinforcement LearningDownload PDF

Published: 13 Sept 2021, Last Modified: 12 Mar 2024CoRL2021 PosterReaders: Everyone
Keywords: Robotics, Reinforcement Learning, Exploration, Real World
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables robots to learn skills from interactions with the real world. In practice, the unstructured step-based exploration used in Deep RL -- often very successful in simulation -- leads to jerky motion patterns on real robots. Consequences of the resulting shaky behavior are poor exploration, or even damage to the robot. We address these issues by adapting state-dependent exploration (SDE) to current Deep RL algorithms. To enable this adaptation, we propose two extensions to the original SDE, using more general features and re-sampling the noise periodically, which leads to a new exploration method generalized state-dependent exploration (gSDE). We evaluate gSDE both in simulation, on PyBullet continuous control tasks, and directly on three different real robots: a tendon-driven elastic robot, a quadruped and an RC car. The noise sampling interval of gSDE enables a compromise between performance and smoothness, which allows training directly on the real robots without loss of performance.
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