SACPlanner: Real-World Collision Avoidance with a Soft Actor Critic Local Planner and Polar State Representations

Khaled Nakhleh, Minahil Raza, Mack Tang, Matthew Andrews, Rinu Boney, Ilija Hadzic, Jeongran Lee, Atefeh Mohajeri, Karina Palyutina

Abstract: We study the training performance of ROS local planners based on Reinforcement Learning (RL), and the trajectories they produce on real-world robots. We show that recent enhancements to the Soft Actor Critic (SAC) algorithm such as RAD and DrQ achieve almost perfect training after only 10000 episodes. We also observe that on real-world robots the resulting SACPlanner is more reactive to obstacles than traditional ROS local planners such as DWA.