Toward faster reinforcement learning for robotics: Using gaussian processes

Abstract

Standard robotic control works perfectly in case of ordinary conditions, but in the case of a change in the conditions (e.g. damaging of one of the motors), the robot won’t achieve its task anymore. We need an algorithm that provide the robot with the ability of adaption to unforeseen situations. Reinforcement learning provide a framework corresponds with that requirements, but it needs big data sets to learn robotic tasks, which is impractical. We discuss using Gaussian processes to improve the efficiency of the Reinforcement learning, where a Gaussian Process will learn a state transition model using data from the robot (interaction) phase, and after that use the learned GP model to simulate trajectories and optimize the robot’s controller in a (simulation) phase. PILCO algorithm considered as the most data efficient RL algorithm. It gives promising results in Cart-pole task, where a working controller was learned after seconds of (interaction) on the real robot, but the whole training time, considering the training in the (simulation) was longer. In this work, we will try to leverage the abilities of the computational graphs to produce a ROS friendly python implementation of PILCO, and discuss a case study of a real world robotic task.